Robert Trent Jones moved to the United States with his parents in 1911. He became a scratch golfer while still a teenager and set a course record at the age of sixteen while playing in the Rochester City Golf Championship. Jones attended Cornell University, where he followed a course of studies personally selected to prepare himself for a career in golf course architecture. At Cornell he designed several greens at the Sodus Bay GC in New York.

By the mid-1960's Robert Trent Jones had become the most widely known and probably the most influential course architect in history. He served as architectural consultant to numerous courses hosting major championship tournaments, many of them courses of his own design. By 1990 he had planned over 450 courses in play in forty-two states and twenty-three countries and had remodelled many others, logging an estimated 300,000 miles by air annually in the process.

He was the author of many essays of golf course architecture, including contributions to Herbert Warren Wind's The Complete Golfer (1954), Will Grimsley's Golf Its History, Events, and People (1966) and Martin Sutton's Golf Courses Design, Construction and Upkeep (2nd ed., 1950). The Sutton work featured several of Jone's freehand sketches of golf holes. In 1989 his long awaited autobiography, Golf's Magnificent Challenge, co-authored with Larry Dennis, was published.

Robert Trent Jones was the first recipient of the ASGCA's Donald Ross Award for outstanding contributions to golf course architecture. He became an advisory member of the National Institute of Social Science, a member of the American Academy of Achievement and recipient of its 1972 Golden Plate Award, and was granted membership to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. In 1981 Jones was given the William D. Richardson Award by the GWAA in recognition of his consistent outstanding contributions. That same year the Metropolitan Golf Association presented him with its Distinguished Service Award. In 1987 the GCSAA honoured him with its Old Tom Morris Award.

By 1990 Trent Jones had been engaged in golf course architecture for sixty years, a record that exceeded even that of Old Tom Morris. The name Robert Trent Jones was still the most recognizable in golf, and that year two courses were named in his honour, one a new design, one an existing course (The Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell University). Also that year Jones company was awarded the largest golf design contract in history, a series of 54-hole daily-fee complexes in Alabama for Sunbelt Golf, Inc., financed in part by that state's public-employee retirement system. Today, the Robert Trent Jones Trail is one of the most popular destinations for golfers around the world.