Imagine a house filled with books, and then try to track down the one bearing his name. The Elements of Style should be somewhere by the desk where the letters get written. The clutter of the children's rooms ought to yield dog- eared copies of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. The Essays and Letters are both within easy reach of the overstuffed armchair in front of the fireplace. For A Subtreasury of American Humor, the best bet is probably the bedside table in the guest room, where Aunt Mary left it a month or so ago. E.B. White's death last week, at 86, was cause for sadness in many spots in millions of homes.
By the time he was 30, White had earned a reputation as a master of luminous prose, and over a career that spanned more than 50 years, he never let his standards or his audience down. He insisted that words, his own and others', should communicate rather than confuse: "When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair." He had no patience with the sloppy or faddish. The spreading misuse of the term hopefully drew a pithy rebuke: "This once useful adverb meaning 'with hope' has been distorted and is now widely used to mean 'I hope' or 'it is to be hoped.' Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly." He gave "finalize" even shorter shrift: "A pompous, ambiguous verb." Funny was a word that should also be held at arm's length: "Nothing becomes funny by being labeled so."
White would have achieved eminence in any case, but the path he took ambled through a series of happy circumstances. The sixth child of a well-to-do piano manufacturer, he grew up in Mount Vernon, a tree-lined suburb of New York City. He went to Cornell, where he gladly surrendered his given names, Elwyn Brooks, for the moniker Andy (after Andrew D. White, the university's first president). After graduation, White held jobs in journalism and advertising without finding an employer who could make good use of his whimsical temperament and lapidary prose.
Along came Harold Ross, the demanding young editor of a new magazine called The New Yorker. White submitted pieces to the fledgling publication, one of which appeared in an early issue. Before long he was invited to take a staff position. Reluctant to report to any office on a fixed schedule, he nevertheless showed up for an interview. There he met Katharine Angell, the fiction editor. He remembered later that "she had a lot of black hair and the knack of making a young contributor feel at ease." He did not know at that moment that the course of his professional and personal lives had been set for good.