His affection for animals stayed with White into manhood, leading him to the farm that became his defining landscape, and informing the tales for children still read by millions of youngsters. White loved the backyard stable, which had a hutch for his rabbits, too. White’s boyhood home also included a series of memorable dogs, along with pigeons, chickens, a turkey, ducks, and geese. He was the youngest of six children, and his father’s success as a business executive meant good things for young Elwyn and his siblings.Įlwyn “owned the first small-sized bicycle on the block, and when he was only eleven he was given a sixteen-foot, dark green Old Towne canoe that, as his father might have said, was ‘the best that money could buy,’” author Scott Elledge notes in his biography. White, Illustrations copyright © renewed 1980 by the Estate of Garth WilliamsĮlwyn Brooks White was born on July 11, 1899, into a prosperous family in Mount Vernon, New York. White, Text copyright © renewed in 1980 by E. His accomplishment seems all the more remarkable because, unlike so many literary geniuses, White appears to have enjoyed a relatively happy childhood, although his youth was complicated by chronic shyness that would plague him throughout his life.Ĭourtesy HarperCollins Publishers. White’s farm inspired not only his essays, which are still highly regarded as classics of the form, but children’s stories, such as Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, that have endured as touchstones for generations of children. His essays-plainspoken, self-deprecating, and with a gentle but abiding skepticism about institutional authority-seemed to express the basic qualities for which his nation was fighting. White needn’t have worried about his relevance to the war effort. “This relieved my mind, as I had been uneasy about indulging myself in pastoral pursuits when so many of my countrymen were struggling for their lives, and for mine.” “Soon my casual pieces depicting life on a saltwater farm in New England were finding their way to members of the Armed Forces in a paperback Overseas edition, and letters of thanks were arriving from homesick soldiers in distant lands,” White later recalled of those war years. His “One Man’s Meat” columns, collected in a book of the same name, were a hit among the troops. And when news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached his household on December 7, 1941, White noted that his wife had lost the stopper to a hot water bottle, a minor mishap that seemed, somehow, to underscore the larger disorder shaking the world to its knees.Įven so, the homely reports from White’s farm to readers of his “One Man’s Meat” essays in Harper’s Magazine seemed, at first glance, a far remove from the global conflagration causing so much suffering among millions of soldiers, sailors, and, civilians.Īnd yet White was the writer that many American fighting men chose to read. The next year, as England and France declared war against Nazi Germany, White walked to his garage and began sorting nails.
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