E. B. White

Elwyn Brooks White was born on July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb just north of New York City. He was the youngest of six children of Samuel Tilly White, an executive at a piano manufacturing firm, and Jessie Hart White, whose father, William Hart, had been a painter of the Hudson River School ^[1]. The household was comfortable and musical, and the boy grew up with animals, bicycles, and a canoe, pleasures he would return to in print for the rest of his life.

Summers on Great Pond in the Belgrade Lakes region of Maine left a deep mark on him. The family began vacationing there in 1905, and White later recalled those Augusts as the happiest stretches of his childhood; his essay "Once More to the Lake" turned the memory into one of the most anthologized pieces of twentieth century American prose ^[2]. He was a nervous child, prone to worry about school recitations and hay fever, but he wrote early and often, winning prizes from St. Nicholas Magazine before he was a teenager ^[1].

White entered Cornell University in 1917. There he picked up the lifelong nickname "Andy," bestowed on Cornell men surnamed White in honor of the university's cofounder Andrew Dickson White, and he found his footing as editor in chief of the Cornell Daily Sun ^[3]. He studied under Professor William Strunk Jr., whose slim classroom manual on usage would reenter White's life four decades later. He graduated in 1921 ^[1].

The years immediately after Cornell were restless ones. White worked briefly for the United Press and the American Legion News Service in New York, disliked both, and in 1922 drove west across the country in a Model T with a college friend, filing occasional pieces along the way. He landed a reporting job at The Seattle Times, lost it in a round of cutbacks, and sailed to Alaska aboard the steamship Buford, working part of the voyage as a saloon boy to pay his passage ^[2]. Back in New York he settled into advertising work as a production assistant and copywriter, a trade he found dispiriting.

The turning point came in 1925, when a new weekly called The New Yorker began publishing. White submitted short manuscripts, and editor Harold Ross, at the urging of his literary editor Katharine Sergeant Angell, brought him onto the staff in 1927 ^[1]. White soon took charge of the "Notes and Comment" section that opened each issue, and his unsigned paragraphs, wry, compact, and morally alert, set the magazine's tone for decades. Colleagues credited him, along with James Thurber, with fixing the casual yet precise style that became the magazine's signature ^[4].

His first books came quickly. Is Sex Necessary?, a parody of pop psychology written with Thurber, appeared in 1929, the same year he published the poetry collection The Lady Is Cold ^[1]. In November 1929 he married Katharine Angell, recently divorced, beginning a partnership that was both domestic and editorial. Their son Joel was born in 1930 ^[2].

Any accounting of E. B. White achievements begins with the essay. In 1938 he stepped back from weekly New Yorker duties and moved with Katharine to a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, where he wrote a monthly column for Harper's Magazine called "One Man's Meat" from 1938 to 1943 ^[2]. Those columns, on sheep, war, township politics, and the death of a pig, collected in book form in 1942, established him as the finest American essayist of his generation. His 1949 essay Here Is New York, written for Holiday magazine, remains a standard portrait of the city, admired partly for a closing passage that seemed to anticipate the vulnerability of Manhattan's skyline ^[5].

His children's fiction reached even further. Stuart Little, the story of a mouse-sized boy born to a New York family, appeared in 1945 after years of gestation from bedtime stories told to nieces and nephews ^[1]. Charlotte's Web followed in 1952, drawn directly from White's own barn in Maine: a spider named Charlotte saves the pig Wilbur from slaughter by weaving words of praise into her web. The book received a Newbery Honor in 1953 and became one of the best selling children's novels ever published in the United States ^[6]. The Trumpet of the Swan, about a trumpeter swan born without a voice, completed the trio in 1970, and that same year the American Library Association gave White the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for lasting contribution to children's literature ^[1].

In 1959 White revised and expanded his old professor's usage manual, and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White became a fixture in American classrooms, selling millions of copies across successive editions ^[3]. Public honors accumulated: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the National Medal for Literature in 1971, and in 1978 a special Pulitzer Prize citation for the full body of his work ^[1]. Among E. B. White facts worth noting is that he never won a conventional Pulitzer in a single category; the board honored the whole career instead.

White's marriage to Katharine Sergeant Angell White lasted nearly forty eight years, until her death in 1977. She was among the most influential fiction editors of her era at The New Yorker, and the two often worked side by side, she shaping other writers' prose while he wrote his own ^[7]. Her son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, grew up to become a celebrated New Yorker writer and editor himself. Joel White, the couple's son, became a respected wooden boat designer and builder in Brooklin, Maine ^[2].

By temperament White was shy, hypochondriacal by his own cheerful admission, and allergic to lecterns; he declined nearly every invitation to speak in public, including many honorary degree ceremonies. He preferred the company of geese, sheep, and dachshunds to literary society, and his letters, published in 1976, show a man who took equal care with a note to a schoolchild and a dispatch to his editor ^[7].

The farm at Allen Cove in North Brooklin was the fixed point of his later decades. He kept hens, cut firewood, sailed the coastal waters in small boats, and treated the barn as both workplace and subject. Readers of Charlotte's Web were essentially touring his own property: the rope swing, the manure pile, and the doorway where he once watched a gray spider spin her egg sac, the observation that seeded the novel ^[6].

White kept writing into old age, though at a slower pace. The Points of My Compass gathered his later essays in 1962, and in 1977 he selected the best of a lifetime's work for Essays of E. B. White, followed a few years later by Poems and Sketches of E. B. White ^[1]. He continued to tinker with The Elements of Style, producing a third edition in 1979, and he answered mail from young readers of Charlotte's Web with patient, unsentimental honesty about why the spider had to die ^[7].

Katharine's death in 1977 left him grieving on the farm they had shared for four decades. He assembled and annotated a collection of her garden writing, Onward and Upward in the Garden, published in 1979, as a kind of memorial ^[7]. In his final years he suffered from Alzheimer's disease. E. B. White died at his home in North Brooklin, Maine, on October 1, 1985, at the age of eighty six. His stepson Roger Angell and New Yorker colleagues remembered him in tributes that emphasized how completely his character matched his prose ^[8].

Few American writers have held two audiences so firmly. Adults know White through the essays and through The Elements of Style, with its famous injunction to omit needless words, advice he embodied better than anyone. Children know him through three novels that remain in print worldwide; Charlotte's Web alone has sold tens of millions of copies and regularly tops surveys of the best children's books ever written ^[6]. Publishers Weekly reported in 2000 that it was the best selling children's paperback of all time in the United States ^[6].

His influence on nonfiction is harder to measure but widely acknowledged. Generations of journalists and essayists learned cadence, restraint, and the uses of the first person from "One Man's Meat" and Here Is New York. Scott Elledge's full length biography, published in 1984 while its subject was still alive, treated him as a central figure in twentieth century American letters, and later studies of The New Yorker have confirmed how much of the magazine's voice was his invention ^[4].

Any E. B. White biography ends where he would have wanted it to: in the barn. He insisted that he wrote about small things, a pig, a lake, a city block, because the small things were what he knew to be true. That fidelity to the observable world, set down in sentences of unusual clarity, is why readers still ask who was E. B. White, and why the answer keeps expanding a century after his birth ^[2].