E.B. White (1899-1985)

Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899, Mount Vernon, New York – October 1, 1985, North Brooklin, Maine) was a leading American essayist, author, humorist, poet and literary stylist.

"No one can write a sentence like White," James Thurber once said of his crisp and graceful writing style. A liberal free-thinker, White often wrote as an ironic onlooker, championing freedom of the individual. His writing ranged from satire to textbooks and children's fiction. His writers' style guide, The Elements of Style, remains a well-regarded text; his three children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, are regarded as classics of the field.

White's style was wry, understated, thoughtful, and informed. He was widely regarded as a master of the English language, noted for clear, well-constructed, and charming prose. Many readers single out his essay "Here Is New York", written for Holiday magazine in 1948 and published in book form the next year, for its distillation of the bittersweet pleasures of New York City life. It was widely quoted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because of a passage--written at the beginning of the age of nuclear weapons--in which he talks about New York's vulnerability: "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 in the sound of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition."

Through his writing, he set a way to write in American English by adopting Anglo-Saxon-derived terms rather than focusing on finding the Latin origin of the words he used. The Associated Press uses White's words in showing his writing style

The rules of The Elements of Style were as simple to state -- 'Omit needless words' -- as they were difficult to obey



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