![]() ![]() White was the one that appeared in the New Yorker. Oddly enough, the most disappointing obituary about E.B. Although never formally an editor of the New Yorker, White, who came to work for the magazine shortly after its founding in 1925, contributed light pieces and poems and (later) “Letters from the East” he supplied the captions for a great many cartoons and the tag lines for the unconsciously comical prose published elsewhere that the magazine calls “news-breaks” and for decades he wrote the “Notes and Comment” section of “Talk of the Town,” which is the closest thing the New Yorker has had in the way of an official voice. Then there is the New Yorker, in which the vast majority of White's writing initially appeared and on which he was a major-in some ways, a decisive-influence. White essay-usually the one on his Model T Ford, “Farewell, My Lovely,” or “The Death of a Pig”-qualifies as something of a rare book. Any high-school or college anthology that does not contain at least one E.B. The Elements of Style, a rather bare-bones writing manual originally produced by his Cornell professor William Strunk, which White brought up to date and to which he added material, was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. His books sold very well and his children's books exceedingly well-in the millions, in fact. He was awarded a special-and, so far as I know, unique-Pulitzer Prize for “the body of his work.” He had honorary degrees from Harvard on down. He had more medals than a Soviet marshal: among them, the National Medal for Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the gold medal for essays and criticism of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. White may nonetheless have also been the most honored American writer of our time. Famously shy though he was said to have been, E.B. An editorial cartoon by Duffy originally printed in the Des Moines Register but picked up around the country-the version I saw was in the Chicago Tribune-depicted, again from Charlotte's Web, the pig Wilbur looking rather sad beneath a spider web hanging from the doorway of a barn in the middle of which is written, some writer. White is New York's Mayor Edward Koch and ended by quoting the penultimate sentence from Charlotte's Web, one of White's three books for children: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” In the public sense, the Nation averred, E.B. ![]() The Nation, too, ran an editorial on its front page marking White's death it used the occasion to point out that the human antonym of E.B. White in favor of careful prose style and world government and against armed slaughter and destruction. The following day Times editors weighed in with “The Elements of White,” an editorial that quoted E.B. White died, at the age of eighty-six, on October 1, 1985, his obituarist in the New York Times referred to him as “one of the nation's most precious literary resources,” and the newspaper backed up the statement by running a six-column-across obituary of the kind it generally grants only to indisputably major statesmen and artists.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |