Bellairs first met Wilcox when the latter was at the University of Chicago's Newberry Library conducting research. He later moved to Boston, where Bellairs caught up with him when he returned from England in 1968. By the early 1970's Wilcox was teaching at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, regularly instructing courses on the Renaissance and Reformation and European Intellectual History as well as serving as the Chair of the Department for many years.
Friends and colleagues described Wilcox as a "brilliant historian" and a "clear and acute analyst with an astonishing breadth of vision" whose courses were particularly sought by graduate students because of his thorough knowledge of the material at hand. He authored three books, the first of which, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (1969), was a reworking of his doctoral thesis. Marilyn Fitschen believes that shortly after he finished his research in the libraries in Florence, Italy, a flood wiped out all the primary texts he used so his work became the definitive work.
In Search of God and Self: Renaissance and Reformation Thought (1975) followed, as did The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (1987), which analyzed the uses of chronology in historical writing over the span of western thought.
Wilcox's connection to the University of New Hampshire is shared through Bellairs's character of Professor Charles Coote, both historians. Wilcox also influenced the character of the evil Snodrog, with horn-rimmed spectacles, in The Pedant and the Shuffly.
