E.B. White, James Thurber, and Their World, Including Roger Angell
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985), forever known and loved as E.B. White, was first known and admired by me when in grade school I read Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. As a high schooler I was committed as a fan by his essays, especially The Second Tree from the Corner and One Man’s Meat. (Meanwhile, James Thurber, White’s friend and colleague at the New Yorker, had me laughing out loud while reading My Life and Hard Times.) At the beginning of my new-book-selling career, the book store I worked in received remaindered copies of White’s Letters, which forever elevated him as an ideal for me.
White is good company. If you know him only as a children’s book writer, read his poetry (often sidelined as “light verse”). Everyone should read some of his essays, especially a classic like “Death of a Pig.” Or dip into his letters, especially any mentioning Fred the Dachshund or any dealing with disapproving or uncomprehending adults and the serious themes of Charlotte’s Web. And you may have been intimidated by The Elements of Style, the book he took up from his old professor at Cornell University, but you would be pleasantly surprised if you read it for a refresher and for entertainment.
On this page I include James Thurber’s works, ever immortal, and White’s stepson, Roger Angell, with whom he was close and who often acted as a custodian of White’s posthumous fame and legacy.
Farewell to the Model T and From Sea to Shining Sea
Farewell to the Model T and From Sea to Shining Sea
In 1922, just out of college and at loose ends, E.B. White set off across America in a Model T. He left his map at home, but packed his typewriter—his true destination, he tells us, was the world of letters. White wrote the richly humorous “Farewell to Model T” for The New Yorker in 1936; it was the first of his essays to bring him fame. In “From Sea to Shining Sea,” White conjures the unspoiled America that remained his most enduring subject.
The first essay of E. B. White’s to become famous, “Farewell to Model T” originally appeared in 1936 in The New Yorker as “Farewell My Lovely.” It is rich in comic descriptions of the eccentricities of the car, the demands it put on its devoted owners, and the hardware and decorative accessories—from 98-cent anti-rattlers to the “de-luxe flower vase of the cut-glass anti-splash type”—that kept them pouring over the Sears Roebuck catalog. If there was an owner’s manual for the flivver, it didn’t begin to divulge what the owner needed to know. That’s where theory, speculation, superstition, and metaphysics came in: “I remember once spitting into a timer,” White recalls, “not in anger, but in a spirit of research.”
It is published for the first time with “Sea to Shining Sea,” in which White conjures the America that he had discovered as a 22-year old during a cross country trip in his Model T. (The year was 1922, the same the year that Fitzgerald and Hemingway went to Paris to find themselves.) In it he would write: “My own vision of the land—my own discovery of it—was shaped, more than by any other instrument, by a Model T Ford...a slow-motion roadster of miraculous design—strong, tremulous, and tireless, from sea to shining sea.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Thoroughly American and utterly beautiful” is how William Shawn, his editor at The New Yorker, described E. B. White’s prose. At the magazine, White developed a pure and plain-spoken literary style; his writing was characterized by wit, sophistication, optimism, and moral steadfastness. In 1978 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the body of his work. E. B. White died in 1985.