William Malone Baskervill

William Malone Baskervill (1850–1899) was an American philologist and teacher of English. Born in Tennessee, he served as a young soldier in the Confederate army, then studied at Leipzig, where he took a doctorate in Anglo-Saxon. From 1881 he was professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where he edited Old English texts, wrote with James Witt Sewell An English Grammar for schools, and encouraged the study of contemporary Southern writing in Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies. He died at forty-nine, admired as a teacher who helped modernize English studies in the South.