by Erica Chung
Perhaps best known for his beloved children??s books, Charlotte??s Web and Stuart Little, E. B. White wrote a clear, lucid prose that continues to charm readers today. William Shawn, White??s editor at The New Yorker, described it as ??thoroughly American and utterly beautiful.? White??s quiet wit, his discreet charm, and his optimistic moral steadfastness have also earned him a permanent place in the American canon as an essayist, literary stylist, and author. He has been awarded the National Medal for Literature, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Pulitzer Prize for the body of his work.
Elwyn Brooks White was born at the turn of the century in Mount Vernon, New York, on July 11, 1899, as the youngest child in an extraordinarily affectionate family. He graduated in 1921 from Cornell University, where he earned the nickname ??Andy? in accordance with Cornell tradition, which held that any White attending the school would be bestowed with the name in reference to university founding father Andrew Dickson White.
After graduating, White traveled and worked various miscellaneous jobs. In 1924, he returned to New York as a young hopeful and worked as a production assistant and advertising copywriter before joining the then new weekly, The New Yorker, where he met his future wife, Katherine Sergeant Angell. He would continue to write for The New Yorker for six decades. In his essay, ??Here is New York,? White would call ??young worshipful beginners? like himself the ones who kept passion alive in the city and accounted for its ??incomparable achievements.? In fact, White loved New York until the end, despite leaving it for Maine in 1939.
The nostalgic accolade he offers to the city in ??Here is New York? belies his own youthful romance with the city ?? with its vulnerability, diversity, characteristic cloistered villages ?? and is generally hailed as one of the most strikingly clairvoyant descriptions of New York ever written.
White??s permanent relocation to Maine in the late 1930s is seen by many as the turning point of his literary career. Dissatisfied with the limits he found in his own writing, he decided to give up his full time job at The New Yorker, uproot his wife and son, and move permanently to Maine. Two days prior to the move, Lee Hartman, editor of Harper??s Magazine, asked White to lunch and offered him a monthly column in the magazine. The column, along with 3 essays he wrote for The New Yorker, make up One Man??s Meat, the book most critics consider White??s best. As White grew busier with farm life and as he aged, his prose style became gradually less effusive, gaining instead what may at first appear to be a disarming simplicity. In One Man??s Meat, White writes: ??I don??t know whether I came to the country to live the simple life; but I am now engaged in a life vastly more complex than anything the city has to offer.? In the same way, stripped of its curlicues, White??s prose, in all its clarity, grew vastly more complex in meaning and greater in depth as he continued to write about his chores and neighbors, the need for internationalism, and the disturbing rumbles from the war overseas.
In 1959, White undertook a project to revise and expand upon a literary style book written and published by William Strunk, his former English professor at Cornell. White??s version of The Elements of Style was well received from the outset and continues to be required reading in schools and universities throughout the country.
White died of Alzheimer??s on October 1st, 1985. His work, which ranges from political essays to children??s books, continues to affect new generations of children and adults alike. He was, after all, some man.
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Articles About White, E.B.
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E. B. White: A Shy Man Fond of Creatures
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February 6, 2007 |
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Like many other famous writers, E.B. White (1899-1985) was a shy man. He avoided most parties and public appearances. He didn't want people to find him or his home in North Brooklin, Maine. In his latter days, he stopped giving interviews. In 1977, he convinced the reporter Herbert Mitgang to write, "To discourage visitors, we hereby report that he lives in 'a New England coastal town,' somewhere between Nova Scotia and Cuba."
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