![]() He was born Elwyn Brooks White in 1899 in Mount Vernon, N.Y., into a semi-genteel family that made vacation escapes to Maine whenever possible. He expressed wonderment at discovering ``that the world would pay a man for setting down a simple, legible account of his own misfortunes.'' The world has done rather more than that: White's honors include the National Medal for Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, membership in the (genuinely elite) American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 1978, a special Pulitzer Prize acknowledging his life's work. Indeed, White's favorite tune seems to have been self-depreciation. ![]() White's most successful full-length books were his beloved children's stories ``Stuart Little,'' ``Charlotte's Web'' and, to a lesser extent, their later successor, ``The Trumpet of the Swan.'' His longtime affiliation with a magazine that embodies urban sophi stication and has routinely been accused, over the years, of encouraging an artificial style that bespeaks intellectual eliteness would seem a further limitation. White has produced an outpouring of affectionate tribute that seems at first glance disproportionate to the achievement of a writer who seems so resolutely ``minor.'' Mr. The recent passing of essayist and New Yorker writer E. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |