Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition

Nowadays the name E. B. White is probably more familiar to children than to adult readers, thanks to his two classic children’s books, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Those adults who do remember White probably think first of The Elements of Style (co-authored by White and William Strunk, Jr.); even today it is the bible for concise, lucid writing. But White was much more than a grammatical pedant: he offered proof that his writing guidelines worked, in his frequent contributions to Harper’s and The New Yorker from 1925 until his death in 1985. Many of those wonderful essays—humane and humorous, insightful and poetic—were later published in book form, but few readers now take the time to track them down; it is their loss. White was also a prolific correspondent, as the Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition (HarperCollins) shows: over 700 pages, indexed and footnoted, updated from the first edition with letters from 1976 to 1985. A foreword by John Updike summarizes White’s life and notes the main correspondents, who include White’s brother Stanley, his wife Katharine (fiction editor at The New Yorker) and the humourist James Thurber. This collection is the closest White came to writing an autobiography, and it reveals why he was one of the most beloved writers of his day.