While enlisted he developed as a professional writer, submitting articles to newspapers and journals, and contributing to Hammersly's Naval Encyclopedia.

Bassett is given much credit for generating popular interest in a field that was acquiring scholarly recognition and developing as a 'science'.

He joined many international societies devoted to literature and folklore, and was active in leading and founding these.

[1] Bassett's interest and activism was in an area alive with vigorous disputes as workers sought to define the field and gain respectability for it.

[2] Bassett's Navy experience gave him proficiency in many modern languages, and experience with foreign peoples, assets which supported his appointments as the Chief Interpreter and Translator of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and chairman of the Folklore Congress of the same year.