New Yorker’s E. B. White Dies : Essayist, 86, Also Known for His Children’s Books

E. B. White, one of America’s foremost essayists, author of classic children’s books and a guiding influence at The New Yorker magazine from its earliest days, died Tuesday at his farm in Brooklin, Me.

He was 86. J. Russell Wiggins, publisher of a local newspaper and a longtime friend, said White had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

“A few months ago, he said he had so much to tell and so little time to tell it,” recalled Wiggins, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who had known White since the late 1940s.

White was familiar to millions on various levels. He was the author of “Charlotte’s Web,” “Stuart Little” and “The Trumpet of the Swan,” children’s books that have also delighted adults. He was well known to writers for his updating of “The Elements of Style,” a highly praised guide to writing and English usage written by one of White’s college professors, Will Strunk.

He was probably at his best, however, in his essays on American life, both urban and rural, many of which appeared in The New Yorker. White also wrote editorials for The New Yorker. And more than any other writer associated with the magazine since its founding in February, 1925, he helped set its tone and style.

White was curious but rarely passionate, intelligent but never intellectual, modern but never faddish or stylish, a city man who wrote some of his best essays about rural life.

And he was often very funny.

The magazine bought some of his light verse in 1925, and by 1929, he was given a small salary and an office. White rarely kept regular hours and would be just as likely to write from Maine as from his apartment in New York.

One of White’s closest friends was James Thurber, with whom he shared an office at The New Yorker in the magazine’s early days. It was White who taught Thurber how to write the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” pieces and who helped launch Thurber’s career as a cartoonist.

Thurber could not get his drawings published until 1929, when he and White collaborated on a humorous book, “Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel the Way You Do.” According to White’s biographer, Scott Elledge, the editor of the book trusted White’s intuition that Thurber’s drawings would be well received. They were so well received that Thurber was an overnight sensation as a cartoonist.

At The New Yorker, White was one of the first--and best--writers of witty tag lines for “news breaks,” the filler items selected from American newspapers because of their typographical errors or odd statements.

In his 1984 biography of White, Elledge recounted some of White’s best tag lines for news breaks, including one written for an advertisement someone spotted in a Pittsburgh newspaper. The ad read: “Gent’s laundry taken home. Or serve at parties at night.” White’s tag line was, “Oh, take it home.”

Caption for Famous Cartoon

It was White who wrote the caption for the now legendary New Yorker cartoon showing an angry little girl at dinner with her mother. When the mother insists that the dish before her is broccoli, the child replies, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

Although he was long associated with rural life in Maine, where he had his farm near Brooklin, Elwyn Brooks White was born July 11, 1899, in the city of Mount Vernon, N.Y., the youngest of six children whose father was president of a piano-making firm in New York City.

He attended Cornell University on a scholarship, leaving briefly during World War I to serve as a private in the Army.

It was at Cornell that White got the nickname “Andy.” The school’s first president had been named Andrew White, and E. B. White’s classmates decided he should be called “Andy” as a prank. For the rest of his life, E. B. was known to friends and associates as Andy White.

After college, White toured the west in a Model A Ford and spent a year writing for a Seattle newspaper. He was not very happy with daily newspapering and once explained why in a letter to one of his brothers:

“I discovered . . . that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart . . . was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace. As a reporter I was a flop because I always came back laden not with facts about the case but with a mind full of the little difficulties and amusements I had encountered in my travels. Not until The New Yorker came along did I ever find any means of expressing these impertinences and irrelevancies.”

At The New Yorker, White not only charmed readers with reports on life at his Maine farm or his experiences in New York, he also wrote eloquently about the evils of totalitarianism, about the need for a world government after the invention of the nuclear bomb and about the dangers of censorship.

During World War II, White joined other writers and artists on the Writers’ War Board and, when assigned to define democracy in a pamphlet, he wrote:

“Surely the board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the word ‘don’t’ in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booth, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. . . .”

White won the National Medal of Literature in 1971 and a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 1978 for the body of his work.

He created a major flap in 1976, when he publicly challenged Esquire magazine’s plan to let corporations pay writers directly for pieces in the magazine. Xerox had just paid Harrison Salisbury $55,000 for an article in Esquire about America at age 200.

Experiment Dropped

White said, “A writer ought to be paid by the paper which is publishing the piece--that’s fundamental. Otherwise, you won’t know what you are reading.” Xerox decided that White was right. Esquire dropped the experiment.

Most of White’s essays were published in book form, and among the best-known collections are “The Essays of E. B. White” (1977), “The Second Tree From the Corner” (1954) and “One Man’s Meat” (1942). The latter was a collection of columns White wrote in the late 1930s for Harper’s magazine while he was living in his 160-year old clapboard farmhouse in Maine and only occasionally traveling to New York City.

From Maine he wrote about hatching goslings, the peculiarities of Maine speech, training a dog and getting ready to own a cow. He wrote that buying a cow was inevitable, because he had found a milking stool when he bought the farm and it was “handmade, smooth with the wax finish which only the seat of an honest man’s breeches can give to wood.”

“Stuart Little” was the first of White’s books for children. It was about a mouse born into a human family.

His children’s story, “Charlotte’s Web,” about a spider who saves a pig’s life by helping make it a tourist attraction, was so popular that White said it had “kept me alive, been my bread and butter.”

View of New York

One of White’s most famous essays was entitled “Here Is New York” (1948). In it he offered his observations about the city that both delighted and confounded him:

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. . . . It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

About the art of writing essays, White once wrote, “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.”

In his updating of “The Elements of Style,” White added a chapter called “An Approach to Style” in which he expanded on such admonishments as “place yourself in the background,” “write in a way that comes naturally” and “do not affect a breezy manner.”

Some years ago, White surprised many of his fans when he revealed that he rarely read books. In a later interview he elaborated:

“I’ve never been much of a reader. Most of my ‘enrichment’ did not come from reading but from other pursuits, like netting a turtle or milking a ewe. I would like to be able now, at the age of 82, to catch up with my reading, but I’m out of luck--my eyes have had it. . . .”

When he received the National Medal for Literature, White said of his craft: “Writing is an act of faith, nothing else. And it must be the writer, above all others, who keeps it alive--choked with laughter or with pain.”

White’s wife, Katharine, one of The New Yorker’s original staff editors, died in 1977. He is survived by their son, Joel, and by two children from Katharine White’s first marriage, Nancy Angell Stableford and Roger Angell, fiction editor of The New Yorker and author of a number of books about baseball.