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He and Katharine fell in love and married, after her divorce, in 1929. They lived happily ever after until her death in 1977. He also joined The New Yorker and, along with Founding Editor Ross and Contributor James Thurber, gave the magazine its voice and character. White could do, and did, everything Ross wanted. He took over "Notes and Comment," the opening section of each week's "Talk of the Town." These paragraphs did not take political sides but mused, sometimes acerbically, on the passing scene. Using the editorial "we," White once described how this process worked: "We write as we please and the magazine publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide, something gets into print." He also turned his hand to cartoon captions ("Mother: 'It's broccoli, dear.' Child: 'I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it.' ") and to "Newsbreaks," those column-ending snippets of published gaffes, capped by New Yorker quips. A Pittsburgh paper once garbled as follows: "Gent's laundry taken home. Or serve at parties at night." White's response: "Oh, take it home."
His competence at The New Yorker eventually bored him. In 1938, he and Katharine moved to a 40-acre farm in North Brooklin, on the Maine seacoast. Ross was flabbergasted by the desertion of his most valuable player: "He just sails around in some God damn boat." Farming and rural life enchanted White, although he wrote Thurber in 1938, "I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens." He kept tending to both, writing a monthly column called "One Man's Meat" for Harper's magazine between 1938 and 1943. He continued to contribute to The New Yorker via the post office. The children's books and gatherings of essays that would ensure his fame followed with reassuring regularity.
Because he so consistently favored straight talk over polemics and specific details over abstractions, White has been dismissed in some quarters as a miniaturist a little too long on charm and short on substance. It is true that big ideas seldom engaged him unless they could be broken down into parts that made clear and common sense. His response to the hue and cry for loyalty oaths during the Communist witch hunts in the early 1950s was typical. He ignored ideology and compressed the body politic into a single form: "If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going."
Since he so carefully watched and reported the small workings of nature, nothing that White wrote is very far removed from the central subject of life and death. In the long run, if there is one, Charlotte's Web should overshadow any number of manifestos. The story of how Wilbur the pig was saved by the unusual weaving skills of Charlotte the spider has taught countless children, many of them now middle-aged, how to weep and exult at the same moment. Wilbur's tribute to his departed benefactor bears repeating, with a nod to the man who created them both: "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."