Letters of E. B. White » (Revised and Updated)

With such classics as Stuart Little and Trumpet of the Swan, E. B. White proved that books for young readers could be as elegant, graceful, and nuanced as the essays he wrote for adults in The New Yorker, where he was one of the magazine s most distinctive and distinguished voices.

Letters of E. B. White touches on a wide variety of subjects, including the New Yorker editor who became the author's wife; their dachshund, Fred, with his "look of fake respectability"; and White's contemporaries, from Harold Ross and James Thurber to Groucho Marx and John Updike and, later, Senator Edmund S. Muskie and Garrison Keillor. Updated with newly released letters from 1976 to 1985, additional photographs, and a new foreword by John Updike, this unparalleled collection of letters from one of America's favorite essayists, poets, and storytellers now spans nearly a century, from 1908 to 1985.

The Barnes & Noble Review

E. B. White's place in 20th-century American literature is impossible to classify. You would want to call him a man of letters, but then you notice that he didn't write about books or culture or ideas or anything remotely intellectual. As a prolific contributor to The New Yorker's "Notes and Comments" department, he was master of the occasional sketch or feuilleton (a term he would never use). He was also a virtuoso of the elegiac personal essay and a dab hand at comic verse, gentle poems, and droll little stories and parodies. His three children's books still cover the land, and he contributed the third element to the writer's trinity of necessary volumes: dictionary, thesaurus, and "Strunk and White." He also wrote hundreds of letters. Indeed, this volume, revised to include letters written in the last decade of his life and now available in paperback, belongs as much to his life's work as anything he ever wrote.