A short life of the author
E.B. White (11 July 1899 – 1 October 1985) was an American essayist, children’s book author, and prose stylist whose work — characterised by clarity, wit, understatement, and a quiet moral seriousness — represents the American informal essay at its finest. His three children’s novels are cornerstones of the form: Charlotte’s Web (1952) is routinely cited as the best children’s book written in English. His revision of The Elements of Style (1959) has sold more than ten million copies and shaped the prose standards of generations of American writers and students. As a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he helped establish the magazine’s voice — civilised, personal, wryly observant — during its formative decades.
Life and Career
Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the youngest of six children in a prosperous family. He attended Cornell University, where he studied under William Strunk Jr. — whose slim textbook on English usage White would later revise and transform into one of the most influential writing guides ever published. After graduation he worked at a news service, in advertising, and as a freelance writer before joining The New Yorker in 1927, shortly after the magazine’s founding by Harold Ross.
At The New Yorker he wrote the “Notes and Comment” section (the unsigned editorial paragraphs that opened each issue) for decades, as well as essays, poems, and pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” He married Katharine Sergeant Angell, the magazine’s fiction editor (and one of the most important editors in American literary history), in 1929. In 1938 they moved to a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine — a move that gave White the rural setting that inspired Charlotte’s Web and the material for some of his finest essays.
Stuart Little (1945) — about a mouse-sized boy born to a human family in New York who sets out on a journey to find his friend, a bird named Margalo — was his first children’s book. The novel was an immediate success, though the children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore (who had enormous influence) tried to suppress it, considering its premise grotesque. It has never gone out of print.
Charlotte’s Web (1952) — about the friendship between Wilbur, a pig, and Charlotte, a spider who saves his life by weaving words into her web — is one of the great American novels in any category. The book confronts death (Charlotte dies; this is not evaded) with the same directness and emotional honesty that characterises White’s best essays, and its final pages are among the most moving in American literature. Garth Williams’s illustrations are integral to the book’s identity. It has sold more than 45 million copies.
The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) — about a trumpeter swan born without a voice who learns to play a trumpet — is the gentlest and least successful of the three, but remains widely read.
The Elements of Style
In 1957, White was asked to revise and expand Strunk’s 43-page The Elements of Style (originally a privately printed textbook from 1918). White added a chapter on style, revised Strunk’s rules, and transformed a classroom handout into the most famous writing guide in the English language. The book’s injunctions — “Omit needless words,” “Use the active voice,” “Write with nouns and verbs” — have become axioms. Its influence on American prose — and on the cult of clarity and concision in American writing — is incalculable, though it has also been criticised (by Geoffrey Pullum and others) for its prescriptivism.
Essays
White’s essays — collected in One Man’s Meat (1942), The Second Tree from the Corner (1954), The Points of My Compass (1962), and Essays of E.B. White (1977) — are the work for which serious readers most value him. “Once More to the Lake” (1941), “Death of a Pig” (1948), and “Here Is New York” (1949) are touchstones of American personal essay writing.
Key Works
- Stuart Little (1945)
- Charlotte’s Web (1952)
- The Elements of Style (with Strunk, 1959)
- Essays of E.B. White (1977)
Why Does Charlotte’s Web Endure?
Charlotte’s Web endures because it does not lie to children. It tells them that friends die, that life goes on, that the cycle of birth and death is neither tragic nor comforting but simply true — and it tells them this in prose of absolute clarity and emotional precision. The final chapter, in which Charlotte’s egg sac hatches and most of her children fly away, leaving three behind to befriend Wilbur, achieves a balance between grief and renewal that is as fine as anything in American literature. White once said that anyone who writes down to children “is merely wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.”
Collecting White
Stuart Little (1945, Harper) — with Garth Williams illustrations — brings $300–$1,000 in fine condition with dust jacket. Charlotte’s Web (1952, Harper) in first edition with first-issue dust jacket brings $1,000–$5,000. The Trumpet of the Swan (1970, Harper) brings $50–$150. The Elements of Style (1959, Macmillan) in first edition brings $100–$300.