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
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
In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
—E. B. White
Topics: Age, Aging
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
Writing is both mask and unveiling.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
—E. B. White
Topics: Gifts
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
—E. B. White
Topics: Swearing, Vulgarity
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
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
—E. B. White
Topics: Luck
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: Poets, Poetry
I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. “Never worry about your heart ’til it stops beating.”
—E. B. White
Topics: Worry
A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist—nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
—E. B. White
Topics: Letters
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
—E. B. White
Topics: Genius
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
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
—E. B. White
Topics: Television
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
—E. B. White
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
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: Friends and Friendship, Friendship
There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
—E. B. White
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
—E. B. White
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
Deathlessness should be arrived at in a… haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
—E. B. White
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
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
—E. B. White
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
—E. B. White
Topics: Nature
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
Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch
—E. B. White
Topics: Pregnancy
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor
—E. B. White
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
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
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