Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on July 11, 1899, the youngest of six children of a piano manufacturer. He told an interviewer late in life that he’d never liked his first name and that his mother had simply run out of names by the time she got to him. He picked up the nickname Andy at Cornell, where every student named White was called that after the university’s co-founder, and it stuck for sixty-four years.
When somebody asks me what good prose sounds like, White is the name I give. He never raised his voice, and he let small subjects grow large on their own. Most people know him only as the grammar scold, the least interesting thing he did.
He died at his farm in Maine in 1985, aged eighty-six. The unusual thing about that life is how little of it looks like a career. He didn’t move between publishers chasing advances, didn’t lecture, avoided public appearances, and spent decades writing short unsigned pieces for one magazine while running a working farm several hundred miles away from it.
He also did the three things that made him famous in three completely separate tones. Essays for adults, a children’s novel about a spider, and a revision of a grammar pamphlet.
Almost nobody who knows one of them has read the other two. That’s why he tends to be described inaccurately depending on who is doing the describing.
His work is also unusually short. The essays run a few pages, the children’s books are slim, and the style guide is under a hundred pages. There’s not a long book anywhere in the body of work.
He grew up in a large comfortable household in Mount Vernon, the youngest of six, and was by his own account an anxious child who was frightened of public speaking and of most social occasions. He never got over either.
He went to Cornell, edited the student paper, graduated, and then did what almost nobody does: he got in a Model T with a friend and drove across the country, taking work where he found it, for the better part of a year.
He joined the New Yorker in 1927, its third year, when it was losing money and hadn’t yet worked out what it was. He wrote the unsigned front section for years, and the magazine’s voice, wry and understated and precise, is considerably his invention.
In 1938 he moved to a saltwater farm in Maine and kept writing for a New York magazine from several hundred miles away. That was an eccentric arrangement at the time and is the reason the essays sound the way they do.
He raised chickens, geese, sheep and pigs there for decades. The animals in Charlotte’s Web were his.
He married Katharine Angell, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, in 1929. She was by most accounts the more consequential figure of the two in shaping what the magazine published, and they worked in the same building for decades.
What is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style really?
It began as a self-published pamphlet by William Strunk Jr., who taught White at Cornell and required his students to buy it.
Decades later White was asked to revise it for a commercial publisher, added a chapter of his own, and the result became the book generations of students were handed. It’s short, opinionated, and closer to a set of preferences than a set of laws. The book is now blamed for a great deal it doesn’t say. Linguists have spent years pointing out that some of its grammatical claims are wrong and that its own prose violates its own rules. Both criticisms are accurate and both slightly miss the target. What the book is good at is a single instruction repeated in many forms: remove what isn’t needed. The reason is that a sentence with nothing spare in it is a sentence a reader can trust. Treat it as a set of strong opinions from two people with excellent ears, and it’s useful for a lifetime. Treat it as grammar and it’ll make you anxious about things that don’t matter.
I think that book does real damage to new writers who treat it like a legal code. Its advice to cut what isn’t needed is the best thing in it. The rest is two men’s taste, and taste is something you’re allowed to disagree with.
What makes E.B. White’s essays his best work?
He wrote for The New Yorker for close to fifty years and the essays are what serious readers come back to.
The subjects are small on purpose. A trip to a lake with his son. A pig that died on his farm. A hurricane, a car, a dog. Nothing that would announce itself as a subject, and every piece arrives somewhere much larger than it started.
The method is worth studying closely because it’s repeatable. He begins with a physical scene described exactly, stays with it long past the point where a lesser writer would move to the point, and lets the meaning come out of the accumulated detail instead of stating it. The last paragraph frequently upends the essay.
The essay about returning to a childhood lake with his own son is the standard example, and it deserves its reputation. The one about a dying pig is better, funnier, and more uncomfortable, and almost nobody reads it.
Anyone writing personal nonfiction should read a dozen of them as a technical exercise. The restraint is the technique.
The pig essay is the piece I’d use to convince anybody that the personal essay matters. A dying pig on a Maine farm shouldn’t be able to carry that much, and it does, because he refused to explain his feelings and let the details do it.
Why does the ending of Charlotte’s Web still work?
Because it refuses to protect the reader from the thing children’s books usually protect them from. The book opens with a girl stopping her father from killing a runt piglet, so death is present on the first page and is present at the end, and the ending isn’t reversed or softened. Charlotte dies. The friend who saved him is gone and the pig goes on living without her.
That’s a book about mortality written for eight-year-olds, and it’s sold over forty-five million copies because children can handle it and know when they’re being handled. The craft decision underneath is the tone. White doesn’t go solemn. The prose stays dry, observational and frequently funny right through the ending. That’s why the grief lands instead of being announced. A sadder style would have made a smaller book.
I have nothing but contempt for children’s books that kill a character and then undo it three pages later. White trusted eight-year-olds with a real death, and children have trusted him back ever since.
He got the material from his own farm, having watched a spider spin an egg sac in his barn, and the agricultural detail is exact because he was doing the work.
What did the New Yorker years teach E.B. White?
He joined the magazine in its third year, when it was failing, and his work is a large part of why it stopped failing. For years he wrote the unsigned front section, short pieces on whatever was happening, produced weekly under deadline with no byline. That’s the least glamorous writing job available and it’s the best training there is. A writer producing seven hundred words a week on assigned subjects, anonymously, learns to find the angle fast and to stop performing.
He met his wife there. Katharine Angell was the magazine’s fiction editor, and by most accounts the more consequential figure of the two in shaping what it published. They married in 1929 and worked in the same building for decades. The observation for a writer is about the value of the anonymous years. Nothing he wrote in that section carries his name, and the voice that made the essays possible was built entirely inside it.
Why was E.B. White’s Stuart Little controversial?
His first children’s book wasn’t universally welcomed, and the objection is interesting. The book is about a mouse born to a human family, and it never explains that. There’s no transformation, no magic, no curse. A human couple simply has a mouse for a son, and the neighbors adjust. An influential children’s librarian of the period objected strongly, on the grounds that the premise was unresolvable and would confuse children, and pushed against the book’s acquisition by libraries. The ending compounded it: Stuart drives north looking for someone and the book stops without telling you whether he finds her. White declined to fix either. He said the book ended where it ended.
Good for him. Adults demanding a tidier ending for a children’s book is the kind of gatekeeping that infuriates me, and he had the spine to leave the book alone. Both objections turned out to be wrong in the same way. Children don’t require the premise to be explained, and they don’t require the search to conclude. The adults were the ones who needed it, and the book has outlasted every argument made against it. There’s a broader point in that for anyone writing for young readers. The instinct to resolve and to explain is nearly always the adult’s anxiety being transferred, and it makes the book smaller.
How did the Maine farm change E.B. White’s writing?
He left New York for a saltwater farm in Maine and kept animals. That changed the tone of everything he wrote afterward. The essays from that period are grounded in physical work: livestock, weather, machinery that fails, the quality of a task that has to be done today regardless of how you feel. That grounding is what stops them from becoming precious. That’s the standing risk of the personal essay. He also kept writing for a New York magazine while living somewhere that had nothing to do with it, and the distance shows in the perspective. He’s describing the city and the century from outside them. The observation for a writer is that a life which produces material beats a life arranged around producing writing. He had chores, and the chores are in the work. Too many writers wall themselves off from ordinary work and then wonder why their pages feel thin, and I’d send every one of them to read the farm essays.
What do people get wrong about E.B. White?
Two things, and they run in opposite directions.
The first is treating him as gentle. The essays contain a good deal of quiet anger, especially the political ones, and he wrote sharply about press freedom and about the internment and loyalty panics of his period. The style is calm and the positions aren’t. The second is treating the style guide as his monument. It’s the book most people know him for and it’s the least of the three careers, being largely a revision of somebody else’s pamphlet. The essays and Charlotte’s Web are his, and they’re considerably better.
What can a writer take from E.B. White?
Four things.
Start small and stay there. The essays begin with a lake or a pig and arrive somewhere enormous, and they get there by refusing to leave the physical detail early.
Hold the tone against the material. Charlotte’s Web is about death and the prose is dry and funny throughout. Matching your tone to your subject is the obvious move and usually the weaker one.
Cut what isn’t needed. That’s the useful half of the style guide, and it’s a habit instead of a rule.
Live somewhere that generates material. He had a farm and chores and the writing is full of both. A life organized entirely around writing produces writing about writing.
How should you mark E.B. White Day?
Read one of the essays. They take fifteen minutes and are the best argument for him. Or reread Charlotte’s Web as an adult. That’s a different book from the one you remember.
If you own a copy of The Elements of Style, open it to the chapter White wrote himself and read that instead of the rules. It’s the part worth having.
If you write, do the exercise. Take a piece of personal writing and delete every sentence that explains what the scene means. If the meaning survives, you didn’t need those sentences. If it collapses, the scene wasn’t doing enough work.
He should be remembered for the spider and the pig, and it’s silly that a revised pamphlet gets top billing in most people’s heads. Read the essays. They’re the best case anybody has made that calm prose can carry real feeling. For other writers whose days are worth marking I’ve written about Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison.