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.
The Years with Ross
The Years with Ross
From iconic American humorist James Thurber, a celebrated and poignant memoir about his years at The New Yorker with the magazine’s unforgettable founder and longtime editor, Harold Ross
“Extremely entertaining. . . . life at The New Yorker emerges as a lovely sort of pageant of lunacy, of practical jokes, of feuds and foibles. It is an affectionate picture of scamps playing their games around a man who, for all his brusqueness, loved them, took care of them, pampered and scolded them like an irascible mother hen.” —New York Times
With a foreword by Adam Gopnik and illustrations by James Thurber
At the helm of America’s most influential literary magazine from 1925 to 1951, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber, whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well. "If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it." But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.
Offering a peek into the lives of two American literary giants and the New York literary scene at its heyday, The Years with Ross is a true classic, and a testament to the enduring influence of their genius.