Author
E. B. White
The New Yorker essayist and author of Charlotte's Web who carried his teacher's 'Omit needless words' into every sentence.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Elwyn Brooks White was born in 1899 in Mount Vernon, New York. At Cornell University he took the English course taught by William Strunk Jr., who handed his students a slim, privately printed rulebook on usage and composition. White graduated in 1921, worked as a reporter and in advertising, and in 1927 joined the young magazine The New Yorker. Over the following decades his unsigned 'Notes and Comment' pieces helped set the magazine's voice: wry, exact and unhurried. In 1929 he married Katharine Sergeant Angell, one of the magazine's editors, and published Is Sex Necessary?, a parody co-written with James Thurber.
In 1938 White moved to a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine. From there he wrote the monthly column 'One Man's Meat' for Harper's Magazine, collected as a book in 1942, and essays such as 'Once More to the Lake' and Here Is New York (1949). He also wrote three children's books that are still widely read: Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952) and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).
In 1957 White wrote a New Yorker piece recalling Strunk's 'little book.' The publisher Macmillan then asked him to revise it for a general audience. The result, The Elements of Style (1959), kept Strunk's rules, added White's introduction and a closing chapter, 'An Approach to Style,' and became a standard text in American classrooms and newsrooms. White received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1978. He died in Maine in 1985.
The signature
White treated clarity as a courtesy. The reader is trying to follow you, and every unnecessary word is one more obstacle in the way. That is why Strunk's command to omit needless words suited him so well. It was never about writing short. It was about making every word do work. His own prose shows the method. He used concrete nouns and active verbs, avoided showy vocabulary, and paid close attention to ordinary things: a barn, a pig, a spider, a lake in August. He kept the writer in the background so that the subject could come forward.
What White added to Strunk was a warning about where rules stop. In 'An Approach to Style' he argues that style cannot be reduced to a checklist, because it grows out of who the writer is: their honesty, their patience, their willingness to revise. The rules clear the ground, and the writer still has to build something worth reading on it. The same discipline runs through a children's novel about friendship and death and a grammar handbook, which is why the book reads less like a set of regulations and more like advice from a demanding, generous editor.