E. B. White: "Not Bad"

Andy, as he was known to friends and family, spent the last 50 years of his life in an old white farmhouse overlooking the sea in North Brooklin, Maine. That's where he wrote most of his best-known essays, three children's books, and an updated version of Will Strunk's Elements of Style.

A generation has grown up since E.B. White died in that farmhouse in 1985, and yet his sly, self-deprecating voice speaks more forcefully than ever. In recent years, Stuart Little has been turned into a franchise by Sony Pictures, and a second film adaptation of Charlotte's Web ("absolutely one of the best films of the year," blurbed Joel Siegel) was released in the final days of 2006. More significantly, White's novel about "some pig" and a spider who was "a true friend and a good writer" has sold almost 50 million copies over the past half century.

Yet unlike the authors of most children's books, E.B. White is not a writer to be discarded once we slip out of childhood.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, minutes after the second tower had been struck by the second plane, E.B. White's grownup readers began circulating passages from his 1948 essay "Here Is New York":

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now; in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest editions.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

At times prescient, rarely profound, White's essays in Harper's, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic were always casually eloquent. Fortunately, the best of them remain in print. In "Death of a Pig" we can enjoy the adult version of the tale that was eventually shaped into Charlotte's Web. In "Once More to the Lake," we see White transform the hoariest of essay topics--"How I Spent My Summer Vacation"--into a startling meditation on mortality.

Finally, for readers with ambitions to improve their own writing, White provided The Elements of Style--a lively revision of the modest guide first composed in 1918 by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr. It appears in our short list of essential Reference Works for Writers.

In a recent New Yorker essay titled "Andy," Roger Angell recalls the final months of his stepfather's life in that white farmhouse in North Brooklin. White was frail in body and mind, but "he enjoyed listening to his own writings, though he wasn’t always clear about who the author was." On occasion, he would ask his son Joe who had written the piece that he had just listened to.

“You did, Dad,” Joe said.

There was a pause, and Andy said, “Well, not bad.”

You'll find three of Andy's finest essays in our collection of 60 Essays: Models of Good Writing:

• "Farewell, My Lovely" (1936) Part 1 #4
• "Once More to the Lake" (1941) Part 2 #8
• "The Ring of Time" (1956) Part 4 #9

Most of his best writing for grownups can be found in Essays of E. B. White (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, reprinted 2006).