E. B. White

Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, the youngest of six children. He hated the name Elwyn and went by Andy — a nickname from Cornell, where incoming students named White were traditionally called after the university's founder, Andrew Dickson White. He graduated from Cornell in 1921, worked briefly as a journalist and advertising copywriter, and joined The New Yorker in 1927, shortly after the magazine's founding. He spent most of his career there, writing the "Notes and Comment" section of Talk of the Town for decades. The connection between White and The New Yorker is so deep that his prose style and the magazine's house style are nearly inseparable.

In 1938, White and his wife, editor Katharine Sergeant Angell, moved from New York City to a saltwater farm in Allen Cove, Maine. The move was temperamentally necessary — White was not a city person by instinct, and he found the rhythms of farming, however difficult, restorative. The farm appears throughout his essays, which are among the finest personal essays in American literature: precise without coldness, humorous without deflection, attentive to particulars without losing sight of the general. One Man's Meat (1942), a collection drawn from a monthly column he wrote for Harper's Magazine during the Maine years, remains his most sustained prose achievement for adult readers.

The Elements of Style began as a private grammar guide written by Cornell professor William Strunk Jr. for his students. White had been one of those students. In 1957, Macmillan asked him to revise and expand it for publication; the resulting "Strunk and White" (1959) became one of the best-selling style guides in English. Its commandments — prefer the active voice, omit needless words, do not affect a breezy manner — are recited in writing courses everywhere. The advice is good, though linguists have noted that White sometimes violates his own rules, and critics of prescriptive style guides have pointed out that many of the guide's prohibitions have no firm basis in historical usage.

White's three children's books occupy a peculiar position: he treated them as peripheral to his serious work, yet they have outlasted almost everything else he wrote. Stuart Little (1945), about a mouse born to a human family in New York, disturbed some readers with its unresolved ending — the protagonist is still searching for something when the book stops. Charlotte's Web (1952), about a spider who writes words in her web to save a pig's life, is one of the most read children's novels in American English; its treatment of death, friendship, and the value of work is frank enough to function differently for children and adults. The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) is the weakest of the three, though still warmly imagined.

White received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and a special Pulitzer Prize for letters in 1978. He is occasionally criticized for a certain nostalgic register — his essays can tip into elegy in a way that romanticizes a rural, white, New England world — and his range of subject matter is narrow by the standards of later essayists. But within that range, his control of tone and sentence is nearly perfect. He knew exactly what he wanted each sentence to do, and he made it do that. Writers still read him to understand how American prose can be both plain and alive.