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 had 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.
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 did not move between publishers chasing advances, did not 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 registers. 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, which is 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 is 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 had not 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 substantially 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, which 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 are not researched. They 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 is short, opinionated, and closer to a set of preferences than a set of laws.
That distinction matters, because the book is now blamed for a great deal it does not 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 genuinely good at is a single instruction repeated in many forms: remove what is not carrying weight. Not because short is better, but because 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 is useful for a lifetime. Treat it as grammar and it will make you anxious about things that do not matter.
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 is repeatable. He begins with a physical scene described precisely, stays with it long past the point where a lesser writer would move to the point, and lets the meaning surface from the accumulated detail instead of stating it. The last paragraph frequently turns the whole thing over.
The essay about returning to a childhood lake with his own son is the standard example, and it earns 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.
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 is not reversed or softened. Charlotte dies. The friend who saved him is gone and the pig goes on living without her.
That is a book about mortality written for eight-year-olds, and it has sold over forty-five million copies because children can handle it and know when they are being handled.
The craft decision underneath is the tone. White does not go solemn. The prose stays dry, observational and frequently funny right through the ending, which is why the grief lands instead of being announced. A sadder style would have made a smaller book.
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 is the least glamorous writing job available and it is 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 was not universally welcomed, and the objection is interesting.
The book is about a mouse born to a human family, and it never explains that. There is 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.
Both objections turned out to be wrong in the same way. Children do not require the premise to be explained, and they do not require the search to conclude. The adults were the ones who needed it, and the book has outlasted every argument made against it.
There is 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, which changed the register of everything he wrote afterward.
The essays from that period are grounded in physical work: livestock, weather, machinery that fails, the specific quality of a task that has to be done today regardless of how you feel. That grounding is what stops them from becoming precious, which is 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 is 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.
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, particularly 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 are not.
The second is treating the style guide as his monument. It is the book most people know him for and it is 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 are 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 is not carrying weight. That is the useful half of the style guide, and it is 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, which take fifteen minutes and are the best argument for him. Or reread Charlotte’s Web as an adult, which is a genuinely 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 is 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 did not need those sentences. If it collapses, the scene was not doing enough work.
For other writers whose days are worth marking I have written about Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison.
Frequently Asked Questions