E. B. White Biography Quotes 33 Report mistakes

33 Quotes
Occup.	Writer
From	USA
Born	July 11, 1899
Died	October 1, 1985
Aged	86 years

Early Life and Education
Elwyn Brooks White was born in 1899 in Mount Vernon, New York, into a family of practical temperament and gentle humor that would later color his prose. As a boy, he loved words, animals, and the natural world, affinities that remained steady companions. He entered Cornell University after World War I began; like many students of the time he spent a brief period in military training before returning to studies. At Cornell he wrote for the student newspaper and acquired the nickname Andy, given to many students named White in honor of the universitys first president, Andrew D. White. That friendly sobriquet followed him for life and fit the unpretentious style he cultivated in print.

Finding a Vocation
After graduating in 1921, White tried the itinerant life of a young writer, drifting through jobs at news services and magazines, sending away poems and short pieces, and learning the discipline of deadlines and word counts. He worked briefly in advertising and for wire services, acquiring a respect for clarity and concision. These experiences honed the plain style he would become known for: sentences that traveled briskly, without ornament, yet carried wit and moral weight. The apprenticeship was practical rather than grand; no one in those years would have guessed that this reporterly craftsman would become one of the most widely read American essayists of the century.

The New Yorker and a Literary Circle
In the mid-1920s White began contributing to The New Yorker, the magazine founded by Harold Ross that favored urban mischief, exact language, and a conversational tone. By 1927 he had joined the staff. There he shared hallways and pages with writers like James Thurber, with whom he later collaborated, and Wolcott Gibbs. Dorothy Parker, who moved in overlapping magazine circles, set a standard for wit that sharpened everyones prose. The New Yorker also introduced him to Katharine Sergeant Angell, the magazines formidable fiction editor. She nurtured many voices and helped shape the house style. Their professional collaboration deepened into a marriage in 1929, creating a household that joined her two children, including the future editor and essayist Roger Angell, with the writing life both adults pursued.

Marriage, Family, and Editorial Partnership
White and Katharine worked closely for decades, sometimes editing one another, often exchanging ideas and sketches that later became columns or essays. She helped him trim and clarify; he supplied a steady stream of Talk of the Town pieces and Comment columns that gave the magazine a humane, skeptical voice. Their partnership extended beyond the office. They eventually bought a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, where White found the subject matter that perfectly suited his temperament: chores, animals, weather, the dignity of work, and the consolations and worries of rural life. Their son, Joel White, grew up in that environment and later became a noted boat designer, a vocation that echoed his fathers love of craft.

Essays and the Making of a Voice
White wrote essays with a steadiness and grace that made his voice recognizable within a paragraph. Collections such as One Mans Meat gathered his dispatches from Maine, mixing observations about barnyard routines and seasons with reflections on war, citizenship, and responsibility. In pieces like Once More to the Lake he returned to childhood scenes to consider memory and mortality with an exactness that never turned bleak. Here Is New York, adapted from an essay late in the 1940s, captured the city as both fragile and resilient. His sentences were modest and exacting, created to be understood by any alert reader. That transparency concealed the labor beneath; friends and colleagues, including William Shawn, who later succeeded Harold Ross as editor, knew how carefully White revised to sound effortless.

Children's Books and an Unusual Kind of Fame
Though he was already admired as an essayist, White reached a vast audience through childrens literature. Stuart Little appeared first, a tale of a small, nattily dressed mouse born into a human family and determined to navigate the human-scaled world with courage and good manners. A few years later he published Charlotte's Web, the story of a pig named Wilbur and a barn spider, Charlotte, whose web-spun words save her friend. The book grew from Whitess barn life and from the sorrow of losing a pig, transformed by imagination into a meditation on friendship, language, and the cycle of life. Decades later he added The Trumpet of the Swan, about a mute trumpeter swan who finds his voice through a trumpet. These books were celebrated not only for charm but for their moral clarity, humor, and respect for a childs intelligence. Teachers, parents, and children wrote him letters for years, and he answered many of them with the same tact he brought to his prose.

Strunk, Style, and the Craft of Prose
At Cornell, White had studied with William Strunk Jr., whose privately printed manual The Elements of Style preached vigor, simplicity, and the deletion of needless words. Years later White wrote about his old professor and helped bring Strunks principles to a broad public. His revision and expansion of The Elements of Style became a standard guide, often called Strunk and White, read by students, journalists, scientists, and novelists alike. It summarized the discipline he practiced: clear structure, straightforward diction, and a preference for the concrete over the abstract. The book also carried his gentle wit, a reminder that good advice about language can be companionable rather than doctrinaire.

Maine, Animals, and the Everyday
The Whites Maine farm was not a retreat from literary life so much as a source for it. Chickens, geese, pigs, and a patient dog offered him incidents and characters. The barn yielded both manual tasks and metaphors, and the shoreline gave him wind, fog, and the reliable drama of tides. He wrote about mending fences, about an ailing animal, about the awkward comedy of a hay rake stuck in a ditch. He believed that attention was a form of respect, and his attention to humble things enlarged them. Friends like James Thurber sometimes visited; editors wrote or phoned to coax overdue copy; and when he needed the bustle of the city he returned to the New Yorker offices to submit copy and catch up on gossip. Yet Maine remained his center of gravity, the place where he could think.

Recognition and Influence
White received many honors over the decades. His childrens books were praised by librarians and awarded distinctions; Charlotte's Web became a staple of school reading lists. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recognition of a public voice that consistently argued for decency, individual liberty, and humor as a civilizing force. In 1978 he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize citation for his body of work, a rare acknowledgment that collapsed the usual categories and affirmed that a writer of essays, juveniles, and grammatical counsel could shape a nations literary habits. Through it all he kept to his work, suspicious of celebrity and happiest at his desk or in the barn.

Later Years and Legacy
White wrote steadily into old age, though he published less frequently and guarded his privacy more. He stayed in touch with younger colleagues and maintained a long correspondence with readers. The deaths of friends from the early New Yorker days, including Harold Ross and later James Thurber, marked the passing of an era. His stepson, Roger Angell, emerged as an accomplished writer and editor in his own right, and the two mens bylines shared the magazine for decades, a quiet family footnote to American letters. White died in 1985 at his home in North Brooklin, Maine.

His legacy endures in three overlapping domains. As an essayist, he demonstrated that plain style can carry complex feeling; the clarity of his prose invites rereading, not because it is difficult, but because it feels inevitable. As a writer for children, he balanced delight with gravity, trusting young readers to face loss and change without sentimentality. As a steward of Strunks principles, he helped generations of writers approach the page with humility and purpose. Those who edited alongside him, like Katharine White and William Shawn, helped form the magazine milieu that supported his best work, but the voice on the page was always his own: modest, exact, companionable, and quietly brave.

Our collection contains 33 quotes who is written by B. White, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Puns & Wordplay - Friendship - Meaning of Life.

Other people realated to B. White: Ogden Nash (Poet), Peter De Vries (Novelist), Robert Benchley (Comedian), Franklin P. Adams (Journalist), Clifton Paul Fadiman (Writer), A. J. Liebling (Journalist), S. J. Perelman (Writer), Saul Steinberg (Artist), Janet Flanner (Journalist), Cliff Fadiman (Author)

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