E.B. White

American · 1899 to 1985

Born Elwyn Brooks White on July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York, the sixth and youngest child of Samuel Tilly White, the president of a piano firm, and Jessie Hart White, the daughter of the Scottish-American landscape painter William Hart, he was taught to read and to watch the natural world by his older brother Stanley, a future professor of landscape architecture. He attended Cornell, edited the Daily Sun, and acquired the nickname Andy by Cornell tradition, which gave that name to any male student named White. He served briefly in the wartime Student Army Training Corps and graduated in 1921. Stints at United Press, the Seattle Times, and an advertising agency followed before he submitted a short piece to a new magazine in 1925, was hired by The New Yorker in 1927, and remained on its masthead for nearly six decades. His Notes and Comment paragraphs, written for the opening of the magazine for half a century, became the model for a kind of unsigned American prose. He wrote three books for children in the longhand of his Maine farmhouse: Stuart Little (1945), a mouse born to an ordinary New York family; Charlotte's Web (1952), a barnyard spider who saves a pig by spinning his praise into her web; and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). His revision of his Cornell professor William Strunk Jr.'s pamphlet The Elements of Style (1959) became the small grey book that has taught two generations of Americans to write. He won a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and the National Medal for Literature in 1971. He died of Alzheimer's disease at his saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, on October 1, 1985, at the age of eighty-six.