William Malone Baskervill (1850–1899) was a writer and professor of the English language and literature at Vanderbilt University.
Early life William Malone Baskerville was born in 1850 in Fayette County, Tennessee. He graduated from Randolph–Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. One of his teachers, Thomas Randoph Price, encouraged him to study in Germany. As a result, he attended the University of Leipzig in 1873–1874, where he became friends with Charles Forster Smith.
Career From 1876 to 1881, Baskervill taught at Wofford College alongside Smith and James H. Kirkland. In 1878-79 he returned to study in Leipzig, and in the summer of 1880, returned to Leipzig to finish his doctorate. Beginning in 1881, Baskervill taught at Vanderbilt University. Together with Smith, who also taught at Vanderbilt, and George Washington Cable, he ran an organization known as the Open Letter Club. Essie Samuels notes this was "a loosely organized attempt to disseminate liberal propaganda concerning civil rights and education for the Negro in the South between 1887 and 1890."Essie (Wenar) Samuels, A History of Failure: The Open Letter Club, unpublished Masters thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1967.
Personal life He was the son-in-law of Methodist Bishop and Vanderbilt University co-founder Holland Nimmons McTyeire.William Sheehan, The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 67
Death He died in 1899.
Bibliography An outline of Anglo-Saxon grammar (from the appendix of Harrison & Baskervill's Anglo-Saxon dictionary), in 1887 An English Grammar with J. W. Sewell, in 1896 Irwin Russell, in 1896 Charles Egbert Craddock, in 1896 Joel Chandler Harris, in 1896 Maurice Thompson, in 1896 Sidney Lanier, in 1896 Anglo-Saxon Prose Reader Reader for Beginners with J. A. Harrison, in 1898 The Elements of English Grammar with J. W. Sewell, in 1900 A School Grammar of the English language (Baskervill-Sewell English course), in 1903
References
External links
Biography of Baskerville from Southern Writers @ GoogleBooks