A member of the faculty since 1964, he held the Ernest I. White Chair of American Studies and Humane Letters from 1975 until his retirement in 1989. Strout wrote many scholarly essays and books on American intellectual and literary history, including "The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl L. Becker and Charles A. Beard" (1958), a pioneering study on Becker and Beard's economic readings of constitutional history, and "Making American Tradition: Visions & Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker" (1990).