Education: A Sense of Style

"I learned more about writing from White than from anybody else," said Humorist James Thurber once of E. B. (for Elwyn Brooks) White, the lucid essayist whose weekly wit led off The New Yorker for years before he deserted Manhattan to write on a farm in Maine. From Thurber it was high praise, and it spoke another truth: behind every writer stands a teacher of some kind. Behind E. B. White himself, it turns out, stands the exhortative ghost of a curious and delightful man, the late Professor William Strunk Jr., proprietor of English...

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