It's the birthday of the writer E.B. White (books by this author), born Elwyn Brooks White in Mount Vernon, New York (1899). He started publishing essays when he was in his mid-20s. He said: "I had done a great deal of writing, but I lacked confidence in my ability to put it to good use. I went abroad one summer and on my return to New York found an accumulation of mail at my apartment. I took the letters, unopened, and went to a Childs restaurant on 14th Street, where I ordered dinner and began opening my mail. From one envelope, two or three checks dropped out, from The New Yorker. I suppose they totaled a little under a hundred dollars, but it looked like a fortune to me. I can still remember the feeling that 'this was it' — I was a pro at last. It was a good feeling and I enjoyed the meal."
After publishing some of his essays, The New Yorker decided to hire White as a staff writer, and he wrote for the magazine for nearly 60 years. In 1938, he and his wife — the New Yorker's fiction editor, Katharine Angell — left New York City and moved to a farm on the coast of Maine. There he continued to write essays, and his reflections on farming for Harper's were collected in the book One Man's Meat (1942).
White had 18 nieces and nephews who asked him to tell stories, so he started writing some down to make sure he wouldn't run out of ideas when one of them asked for a story. One day he fell asleep on a train and dreamed about a mouse-boy with human parents — White described him as "the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep." Inspired by that character, he wrote Stuart Little, whichwas published in 1945. His next children's book, Charlotte's Web (1952), has sold more than 45 million copies. When it was published, Eudora Welty praised it in The New York Times, beginning her review: "E.B. White has written a book for children, which is nice for us older ones as it calls for big type. The book has liveliness and felicity, tenderness and unexpectedness, grace and humor and praise of life, and the good backbone of succinctness that only the most highly imaginative stories seem to grow."
White said: "Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I'm lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it's no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common."
In a letter to his brother, White wrote: "I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace. [...] The rewards of such endeavor are not that I have acquired an audience or a following, as you suggest (fame of any kind being a Pyrrhic victory), but that sometimes in writing of myself — which is the only subject anyone knows intimately — I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound."
After publishing some of his essays, The New Yorker decided to hire White as a staff writer, and he wrote for the magazine for nearly 60 years. In 1938, he and his wife — the New Yorker's fiction editor, Katharine Angell — left New York City and moved to a farm on the coast of Maine. There he continued to write essays, and his reflections on farming for Harper's were collected in the book One Man's Meat (1942).
White had 18 nieces and nephews who asked him to tell stories, so he started writing some down to make sure he wouldn't run out of ideas when one of them asked for a story. One day he fell asleep on a train and dreamed about a mouse-boy with human parents — White described him as "the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep." Inspired by that character, he wrote Stuart Little, whichwas published in 1945. His next children's book, Charlotte's Web (1952), has sold more than 45 million copies. When it was published, Eudora Welty praised it in The New York Times, beginning her review: "E.B. White has written a book for children, which is nice for us older ones as it calls for big type. The book has liveliness and felicity, tenderness and unexpectedness, grace and humor and praise of life, and the good backbone of succinctness that only the most highly imaginative stories seem to grow."
White said: "Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I'm lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it's no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common."
In a letter to his brother, White wrote: "I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace. [...] The rewards of such endeavor are not that I have acquired an audience or a following, as you suggest (fame of any kind being a Pyrrhic victory), but that sometimes in writing of myself — which is the only subject anyone knows intimately — I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound."
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