[3] He then taught English at Cornell for 46 years, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa,[4] disdaining specialization and becoming an expert in both classical and non-English literature.
[5] In 1922 he published English Metres, a study of poetic metrical form, and he compiled critical editions of Cynewulf's Juliana, several works of Dryden, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and several Shakespearean plays.
Strunk intended the guide "to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention ... on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated."
In 1945 he suffered a mental breakdown, diagnosed as "senile psychosis", and died less than a year later at the Hudson River Psychiatric Institute in Poughkeepsie, New York.
[12] Strunk's Cornell obituary noted that his friends and former students remembered "his kindness, his helpfulness as a teacher and colleague, [and] his boyish lack of envy and guile".