Happy Birthday, E. B. White

Born July 11, 1899, Mount Vernon, NY | Died October 1, 1985, Brooklin, Maine

Today the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates essayist, prose stylist, and children’s book author Elwyn Brooks White—known to friends and family as Andy and to readers as E. B. White—on the thirty-ninth anniversary of his death. White published his first article in The New Yorker in 1925, joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1927, and over the course of almost six decades became one of the publication’s most well-known contributors. White was a columnist for Harper’s Magazine from 1938-1943.

E. B. White with his dog Minnie, date unknown

“There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast. I like the essay, have always liked it, and even as a child was at work, attempting to inflict my young thoughts and experiences on others by putting them on paper.”

E. B. White made this cover—the only one he ever did—for The New Yorker. In an interview in The Paris Review, he said, “I’m not an artist and never did any drawings for The New Yorker. I did turn in a cover and it was published. I can’t draw or paint, but I was sick in bed with tonsillitis or something, and I had nothing to occupy me, but I had a cover idea—of a sea horse wearing a nose bag. I borrowed my son’s watercolor set, copied a sea horse from a picture in Webster’s dictionary, and managed to produce a cover that was bought. It wasn’t much of a thing. I even loused up the whole business finally by printing the word ‘oats’ on the nose bag, lest somebody fail to get the point.”

Candor “is the basic ingredient [of an essayist]. And even the essayist’s escape from discipline is only a partial escape: the essay, although a relaxed form, imposes its own disciplines, raises is own problems, and these disciplines and problems soon become apparent and (we all home) act as a deterrent to anyone wielding a pen merely because he entertains random thoughts or is in a happy or wandering mood.”

E. B. White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952. In 1959 he edited and updated The Elements of Style, first published by William Strunk, who was one of White’s professors at Cornell. In 1976, a 686-page volume of White’s letters was published, which garnered a special Pulitzer in 1978.

First published work:

• “A Step Forward,” The New Yorker, April 18, 1925.

Select nonfiction bibliography¹:

• Writings from the New Yorker, 1927-1976 (Harper Perennial, 2006).

• Essays of E. B. White (Harper Perennial, 2016). Selected by the author.

• One Man’s Meat (Tilbury House, 2023). First published in 1944, this book features White’s essays published in Harper’s Magazine.

See also:

Visit the E. B. White Collection at the Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Watch A Maine Lobsterman, written and narrated by E. B. White and introduced by Alistair Cooke, Omnibus Television,1954.

Read “The Dark Side of E. B. White,” on “Once More to the Lake” by Best American Essays founding editor Robert Atwan, posted on Slant Books’s Close Reading blog, 2021 (this essay was revised, expanded, and included in the Foreword to The Best American Essays 2022).

Read a close reading of “Death of a Pig” by Robert Atwan, Creative Nonfiction, 2011.

Read Ned Stuckey-French, The American Essay in the American Century (Missouri University Press, 2011).

Read Robert Root, E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist (University of Iowa Press, 1999).

Read William McPherson, “The White papers: first-class mail,” on the 686-page volume of letters by E. B. White, published in 1976.

Read “E. B. White, The Art of the Essay No. 1,” The Paris Review, Fall 1969, Interviewed by George Plimpton and Frank Crowther.

Read essays selected as Notables in The Best American Essays series:

• Stefanie Weisman, “In Search of E. B.,” Michigan Quarterly Review (BAE 2013).

• Michael Cohen, “On Not Being E. B. White,” Kenyon Review (BAE 2011).

• Roger Angell, “Andy,” The New Yorker (BAE 2006).

• Joseph Epstein, “E. B. White, Dark & Lite,” Commentary (BAE 1987).

• William Howarth, “E. B. White at The New Yorker,” The Sewanee Review (BAE 1986).

¹

1. In a footnote in his “Foreword” to The Best American Essays 2022, Robert Atwan writes, “As far as I know, White’s essays can be found only in the various collections he personally assembled from 1942 to 1977. I’m surprised that no one has published a one-volume complete collection. Or better yet, a smaller collection that shows White only at his very best.”