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.
Here is New York
Here is New York
“Just to dip into this miraculous essay—to experience the wonderful lightness and momentum of its prose, its supremely casual air and surprisingly tight knit—is to find oneself going ahead and rereading it all. White’s homage feels as fresh as fifty years ago.“—John Updike
In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city. The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”
″Here is New York, a lovely evocation of the spirit of the city, is even more a startlingly vivid picture of a particular time. You sweat with White in his un-air-conditioned 90-degree hotel room and walk down the streets of 1948. The ride is a great one; the writing is good enough to bottle.“—Luc Sante
“New York was the most exciting, most civilized, most congenial city in the world when this book was written. It’s the finest portrait ever painted of the city at the height of its glory.“—Russell Baker
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
“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.
Roger Angell is a writer and fiction editor at The New Yorker.