![]() ``The Second Tree From the Corner'' (1954), and ``The Points of My Compass'' (1962) followed later, after ``Stuart Little'' and ``Charlotte's Web'' had proved the virtually universal appeal of White's down-to-earth prose.Īndy White attempted some serious commentary on international relations and tensions during World War II it's as if he felt his minor-key mastery wasn't enough, that he had to step forth, and speak forth. White's collections of writings began appearing at about this time: ``One Man's Meat'' (1942), probably the best of them, includes the essays he produced for a column so titled in Harper's magazine, White's only sinecure of any consequence away from The New Yorker. ![]() This life-change wouldn't last because The New Yorker's persuasive editor, Harold Ross, lured them back a few years later to work full time and help pull the magazine out of some severe financial doldrums. In 1938, the Whites packed up and moved to North Brooklin, Maine. (A likely literary byproduct of this union, her son and his stepson, would grow up to be Roger Angell, the world's best writer on the subject of baseball.) That same year saw the publication of White's inspired collaboration with James Thurber, ``Is Sex Necessary?'' a deft parody of the sexologists' writing then in vogue that has lost little of its impish freshness. In 1929, White married Katharine Angell, also an editor there. After graduation, he traveled about the country, took assorted reporter jobs, and was working in advertising when he hooked up with the newly established (1925) New Yorker magazine, as an all-purpose contri butor and, later, member of the editorial staff. ``Andy'' (which he preferred to the unwelcome ``Elwyn'') was educated at Cornell University, where he became a highly successful collegiate journalist. 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.
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