Robert Trent Jones moved to the USA with his parents in 1911. While still in his teens, he proved to be an excellent golfer and at the age of sixteen he won the course record at the Rochester championship. Jones attended Cornell University, where he took a course that specifically oriented him towards golf course architecture. At Cornell he designed some courses at the Sodus Bay GC Golf Club in New York.
By the mid-1960s, Robert Trent Jones was already the best known and perhaps the most influential golf architect of all time. He was a consultant for many major tournament courses, many of which he designed himself. By 1990 he had more than 450 active courses in 42 states and 23 countries and had remodeled many others, logging around 300,000 miles a year on his work trips.
He has published several works on golf architecture, including some contributions to The Complete Golfer by Herbert Warren Wind (1954), Golf Its History, Events, and People by Will Grimsley (1966) and Golf Courses Design, Construction and Upkeep by Martin Sutton (2nd ed., 1950). Sutton's work contained several drawings of golf holes designed by Jones. In 1989 he published his long-awaited autobiography Golfs Magnificent Challenge, co-authored by Larry Dennis.
Robert Trent Jones was the first recipient of the ASGCA's Donald Ross Award for outstanding contributions to golf architecture. He became an advisor to the National Institute of Social Science, a member of the American Academy of Achievement and received a silver salver in 1972, being made a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. In 1981 Jones received the GWAA's William D. Richardson Award in recognition of his consistently outstanding contributions. That same year the Metropolitan Golf Association awarded him the Distinguished Service Award. In 1987 the GCSAA awarded him the Old Tom Morris Award.
By 1990, Trent Jones had completed 60 years of golf course design, surpassing even Old Tom Morris. Robert Trent Jones was still the biggest name in golf and that year two courses were named in his honor, one new and one existing (the Robert Trent Jones course at Cornell). That same year Jones' company was awarded the largest golf course design contract ever, a series of 54 daily fee holes in Alabama for Sunbelt Golf, Inc., a job financed in part by the state's public employee pension fund. Today this complex is one of the most visited destinations for golfers.