E. B. White (1985–99,) fully Elwyn Brooks White, was an American essayist, author, and literary stylist, whose eloquent prose and the clarity of his rhetoric appealed to readers of all ages.
Born in Mount Vernon, New York, White graduated from Cornell 1821 and worked as a reporter and freelance writer. He joined The New Yorker in 1926 and he remained with the weekly magazine for the rest of his career. For three decades, under White’s direction, The New Yorker became a paragon of elegant and simple style in non-fiction. He also wrote a monthly column of essays about rural life for Harper’s magazine 1938–43.
White’s notable books of essays include Quo Vadimus? (1939,) One Man’s Meat (1942,) and The Points of My Compass (1962.) White is the author of the children’s classics Stuart Little (1945,) Charlotte’s Web (1952; animated film, 1973; feature film, 2006,) and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970; film, 1999; sequel, 2002.)
White is also known for his best-selling revision of William Strunk Jr’s Elements of Style, popularly known as Strunk and White (1959.)
White’s Letters were published in 1976, and a collection of his Poems and Sketches in 1981.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by E. B. White
The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.
—E. B. White
Topics: Television
Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.
—E. B. White
Topics: Principles
The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.
—E. B. White
Topics: Politics
A “fraternity” is the antithesis of fraternity. The first… is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.
—E. B. White
Topics: Perspective
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education—sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
—E. B. White
Topics: Language
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
—E. B. White
It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
—E. B. White
Topics: Parties
A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
—E. B. White
Topics: Poetry, Poets
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
I’m not against machines, as are some people who feel that the computer is leading us back into the jungle…I’m against machines only when the convenience they afford to some people is regarded as more important than the inconvenience they cause to all.
In short, I don’t think computers should wear the pants or make the decisions. They are deficient in humor, they are not intuitive, and they are not aware of the imponderables. The men who feed them seem to believe that everything is made out of ponderables, which isn’t the case. I read a poem once that a computer had written, but didn’t care much for it. It seemed to me I could write a better one myself, if I were to put my mind to it.
—E. B. White
Topics: Computers
A man’s liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood—a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.
—E. B. White
Topics: Generations
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
—E. B. White
Topics: Anger
Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
—E. B. White
Topics: Architecture
I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.
—E. B. White
Topics: Action, Change, Good, Time Management
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
—E. B. White
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
—E. B. White
Topics: Humor
Commuter—one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.
—E. B. White
Topics: Cities, City Life
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
—E. B. White
Topics: Farming
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
—E. B. White
Topics: Genius
All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.
—E. B. White
Topics: Weather
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
—E. B. White
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
—E. B. White
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
—E. B. White
Topics: Luck
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor
—E. B. White
Topics: Americans
The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.
—E. B. White
Topics: Design
To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
—E. B. White
Topics: Gifts
Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.
—E. B. White
Topics: Advertising
A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
—E. B. White
Topics: Politics, Politicians
The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man’s invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog’s way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.
—E. B. White
Topics: Liberalism
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable—or at least deserving of support.
—E. B. White
Topics: America
There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
—E. B. White
Topics: Youth
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
—E. B. White
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
—E. B. White
Topics: Driving
In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
—E. B. White
Topics: Age
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E. B. White
Topics: Democracy
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
—E. B. White
Topics: Cities, City Life
Be obscure clearly.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.
—E. B. White
Topics: Dogs
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
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