eb white essay on new york

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Here is New York: E.B. White’s most famous essay

E.B. White is most famous for his novels for children – Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan – but he is also one of the twentieth century’s greatest essayists, contributing countless pieces to The New Yorker magazine. He died in 1985.

He is not a comic writer in the vein of Thurber (although he did collaborate with that writer on at least one book), but his quiet, homespun, deadpan, humane and elegant essays are essential Americana of a past age. He helped establish the tone of intellectualism and cosmopolitanism that became the trademark of The New Yorker while – in my view anyway – avoiding the smug self-satisfaction that sometimes mars the work of some other contributors.

White was most at home in rural Maine and many of his pieces explore the contrasts of rural versus urban life. His son-in-law has described White as an ‘inveterate non-traveller’ but in 1948 White was persuaded to contribute a piece to what was then a relatively new publication, Holiday magazine. Founded just a couple of years earlier in 1946, Holiday reflected a growing demand for quality writing on leisure travel, and by paying well and apparently offering lavish expense accounts it brought top-flight writers such as Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, VS Pritchett and Saul Bellow to its pages to write what we would now call long-form travel articles.

For Holiday magazine White wrote what has become not just one of his most cherished essays but in many startling ways his most prescient, Here is New York. In it he explores the tensions (racial and cultural discrimination, overcrowding, poverty) that should render urban life in New York an impossibility, and the tolerance and ‘inviolable truces’ that manage to render life in the city not just possible but essential and necessary for the many who have chosen it.

Written during the summer heat of 1948, White captures a disappearing old New York of speakeasies and diners, the demolished ‘El’ tracks, the neighbourhood ice-coal-and-wood cellars, and the thousands of neighbourhoods – often a handful of blocks, smaller than a rural village – that made up the patchwork of New York City. The essay captures a world that is only just beginning to recover from the Second World War and White identifies the UN headquarters between 42nd and 48th Streets – still three years from completion – as one of the most visible expressions of this.

White’s essay was published in Holiday magazine in 1948 and the following year was published in a slim volume of its own. In 1999, on the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication in book form and the hundredth anniversary of White’s birth, Here is New York was reissued in a facsimile edition by the Little Book Room, New York. The events of 9/11, still at that time a couple of years away, would forever change the way we read this pristine little essay.

The shocking prescience of the essay lies in the way that White at times seems to foresee the appalling tragedy of 9/11. He doesn’t, of course. He is writing against the more generalised paranoia and fear of a world recovering from war and the bleak prospects for humankind should it fail to avoid a third world war.

Nonetheless, when he writes the following it comes as a punch to the solar plexus:

‘ The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first  time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.’

The very concentration of New York – of culture, of finance, of people, of buildings, of everything that as White points out make it not a national nor even a state capital but a ‘capital of the world’ – render it a priority target ‘in the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightening…’

9/11 has without doubt given additional emotional heft and resonance to this essay but has not entirely hijacked its meaning. White’s affable, deadpan humour and humanity shine through, as does his enduring love of New York and his profound admiration for the writers and chroniclers and newspaper giants whose writings drew him there in the first place. (Joseph Mitchell’s essays of old New York, for example – now collected as Up in the Old Hotel – occupy a special place in White’s pantheon, but his list of heroes is a long one and an education in itself in American non-fiction writing and journalism.)

The opening and the ending of White’s essay are justly famous. ‘ On any person who desires such queer prizes,’ White writes in the very first sentence, ‘ New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.’ And in the final paragraph, writing of a modest and battered urban willow tree that he regards as a symbol of life-against-the-odds, he says, ‘Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvellous monument which not to look upon would be like death.’

That curious but beautifully rhythmic inversion of the verb in the last few words is also justly acclaimed.

I think that Here is New York will be widely reread in this, the year that unbelievably marks the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Little Book Room’s elegant hardback can still be bought for under a tenner and secondhand copies can be found for coppers. Here is New York can also be found in the Harper-Collins paperback, The Essays of E.B. White (an excellent selection in the Perennial Classics series).

Alun Severn

E.B. White elsewhere on Letterpress:

Separated by a common language: children’s books I didn’t grow up with

Garth Williams, illustrator

A collection of wisdom, a focus on the universal

E. B. White on the Nature and Complexity of New York City

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy."

"[A] reason I like the city better than the country," wrote accustomed New Yorker Andy Warhol in his propulsive capsule of personal philosophy,  "Is that in the city everything is geared to working, and in the country, everything is geared to relaxation. I like working better than relaxation."

Such is the person we find in New York City: the urgent doer. Everything is being done all the time with purpose if not expediency. And the resultant neurosis, like Warhol's, or existential drama, like that of Patti Smith or Dorothy Parker, is borne alongside wild cab rides and excellent take-out.

Can we ever blazon our mark on this City, Parker seems to ask once, or does it merely mark us?

If I should labor through daylight and dark, Consecrate, valorous, serious, true, Then on the world I may blazon my mark; And what if I don’t, and what if I do? From Dorothy Parker's "Philosophy"

Like Parker, American essayist Elwyn Brooks "E. B." White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985)  wrote for fifty years at The  New Yorker   E. B. White might easily be a name you've heard but cannot place (my husband informed me he suffered such, so I thought I better explain).       White is best-known for the children's classics, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little . He also updated the work of his former writing professor at Cornell, William Strunk, to create Strunk & White's  Elements of Style.   Check out the illustrated The Elements of Style by fellow New Yorker Maira Kalman . and offers us this slice of the metropolis:

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town. From E. B. White's "Here is New York"

The idea of this collection of strangers sits well with me and most inhabitants would agree it is a city of anonymity.

And yet, there are boundaries to that privacy, that isolation.

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost every body wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only a small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I did not attend. From E. B. White's "Here is New York"

As White notices, we have immunity to things outside our boundaries. But not always. The results can be grand (see Rebecca Solnit's study of human intervention and compassion in the face of disaster ) or repetitively grating. White addresses the latter:

New York has changed in tempo and in temper during the years I have known it. There is greater tension, and increased irritability. You encounter it in many places, in many faces. The normal frustrations of modern life are here multiplied and amplified—a single run of a cross-town bus contains, for the driver, enough frustration and annoyance to carry him over the edge of sanity: the light that changes always an instant too soon, the passenger that bangs on the shut door, the truck that blocks the only opening, the coin that slips to the floor, the question asked at the wrong moment..." From E. B. White's "Here is New York"

New York City was White's residence, a place he understood thoroughly (like filmmaker Sidney Lumet or poet Grace Paley ) but never called "home."

As a result, his portrait of this inimitable city is diverse and complex. He seems to ask, is New York a thing or an atmosphere? Should we give it qualities of personhood? Does it inhale and exhale? How do we engage?

Essays of E. B. White present the dry humor and self-effacing ploy of an English author (he wasn't) and the loving detail of a highly observant and philosophical man (he was). It is also stepping apart to give us something universal about place.

White's essay about the 1939 World's Fair set in Queens and false thoughts on the poisoned promises of the future - something by its essence never arrives and is always anticipated - could be republished every fifty years on the hour.

It is all rather serious-minded, this World of Tomorrow, and extremely impersonal. [...] When the night falls in the General Motors exhibit and you lean back in the cushioned chair (yourself in motion and the world so still) and hear (from the depths of the chair) the soft-electric assurance of a better life—the life that rests on wheels alone—there is a strong, sweet poison which infects the blood. I didn't want to wake up. From E. B. White's "The World of Tomorrow"

My favorite piece in Essays of E. B. White is "Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street," an essay about leaving New York for good. White tears through all of the little collections that amass in homes—"as much paraphernalia as an aircraft can hold," the things we've made precious by caring . What to get rid of, what to keep, disposing of the indispensable.

It is an essay about the abandonment of things, of city, of self.

I kept hoping that some morning, as by magic, all books, pictures, records, chairs, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass, utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like an outgoing tide. But this did not happen. [...] You can whittle away at it, but to empty the place completely takes real ingenuity and great staying power. From E. B. White's "Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street"

White moved to Maine - he called it his home - and remained there until he died in 1985. When Andy Warhol died, two years after White, his massive collection (hoard), all acquired on the streets and shops of New York, was untouched and eventually sold at auction. The artist, as a collector, had taken shape. He never moved his things, never divorced himself from the City. Did he ever relax? Did he change the map of New York?

It is easy to become enamored by White's deceptively blithe musings of place (he is what we non-New Yorkers would call "down to earth", lines like "I wasn't prepared for the World's Fair and it certainly wasn't prepared for me") and take his detachment for granted.

White is, indeed, one of many writers who occasionally sets down his pen, takes a lengthy look in the mirror, and draws a self-portrait, concluding, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him is of general interest." A grievance leveled at New Yorkers by non-New Yorkers all the time.

I prefer contemporary writer and New Yorker Durga Chew Bose's simple singlet "The best ideas outrun me. That's why I write." For some, writing is simply done

Again, the doing. How many writers are outwriting their thoughts right now?

White continues:

The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person according to his mood or subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

Like Ernest Hemingway, a writer born the same year as White, who wrote truth must be the point of origin of all writing , White believed "Candor […] is the basic ingredient." It might not always be interesting, but one should still look, write, and present. In a word, care.

Perhaps that is what Warhol meant by "relax"; it is striving, to care . In New York, we (I flex between "we" and "they" for I have lived there but am not of there) are always striving. Relentlessly American that way.

So, do we ever impose ourselves on the city, or is it only on us? Grace Paley wrote of this:

At the Battery I am standing on one foot at the prow of great Manhattan leaning forward projecting a little into the bright harbor If only a topographer in a helicopter would pass over my shadow I might be imposed forever on the maps of this city. From Grace Paley's "At the Battery"

That such a city could hold the minds and aspirations of so many, without knuckling them together in defeat, and without wholly changing its maps, never ceases to amaze me. New York holds it all together, remains, and yet still moves. It is this being that White wrangles within Essays.

While White wrote and Parker posed and Warhola vacillated, so many others were making their way, as the case may be, like  James Baldwin  selling wares in the streets at seven, or Billie Holliday  who cleaned brothels at age 10, or Joan Didion imbibing the pain of her grief-soaked apartment.

All overlapping, crossing paths, intersecting. They might, as White said, "all be strangers" but they certainly have this grand, grand thing in common.

Ellen Vrana

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Here is New York Hardcover – January 1, 1999

• Book 1 of 1 Here is New York
• Print length 56 pages
• Language English
• Publisher The Little Bookroom
• Publication date January 1, 1999
• Dimensions 5.28 x 0.4 x 7.31 inches
• ISBN-10 1892145022
• ISBN-13 978-1892145024
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

Anyone who's ever cherished his essays--or even Charlotte's Web --knows that White is the most elegant of all possible stylists. There's not a sentence here that does not make itself felt right down to the reader's very bones. What would the author make of Giuliani's New York? Or of Times Square, Disney-style? It's hard to say for sure. But not even Planet Hollywood could ruin White's abiding sense of wonder: "The city is like poetry: it compresses all life ... into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines." This lovely new edition marks the 100th anniversary of E.B. White's birth--cause for celebration indeed. --Mary Park

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Little Bookroom; First Edition (January 1, 1999)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 56 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1892145022
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1892145024
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.28 x 0.4 x 7.31 inches
• #165 in Essays (Books)
• #458 in U.S. State & Local History
• #1,747 in Memoirs (Books)

About the authors

Roger angell.

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E. B. White

E.B. White, the author of twenty books of prose and poetry, was awarded the 1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his children's books, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. This award is now given every three years "to an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have, over a period of years, make a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children." The year 1970 also marked the publication of Mr. White's third book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan, honored by The International Board on Books for Young People as an outstanding example of literature with international importance. In 1973, it received the Sequoyah Award (Oklahoma) and the William Allen White Award (Kansas), voted by the school children of those states as their "favorite book" of the year.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Mr. White attended public schools there. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1921, worked in New York for a year, then traveled about. After five or six years of trying many sorts of jobs, he joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine, then in its infancy. The connection proved a happy one and resulted in a steady output of satirical sketches, poems, essays, and editorials. His essays have also appeared in Harper's Magazine, and his books include One Man's Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E.B. White, The Essays of E.B. White and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White. In 1938 Mr. White moved to the country. On his farm in Maine he kept animals, and some of these creatures got into his stories and books. Mr. White said he found writing difficult and bad for one's disposition, but he kept at it. He began Stuart Little in the hope of amusing a six-year-old niece of his, but before he finished it, she had grown up.

For his total contribution to American letters, Mr. White was awarded the 1971 National Medal for Literature. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy named Mr. White as one of thirty-one Americans to receive the Presidential Medal for Freedom. Mr. White also received the National Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism, and in 1973 the members of the Institute elected him to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a society of fifty members. He also received honorary degrees from seven colleges and universities. Mr. White died on October 1, 1985.

Photo by White Literary LLC [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Customers find the book captivating, inspirational, and powerful. They also say it's a touching, reflective book that gives a portrait of New York.

"A nice period essay which, as a gift, pleased my brother-in-law...." Read more

"...off that style brilliantly in this highly literate, amusing, and passionate memoir of New York City in 1948...." Read more

"well written. good account of NYC life .Seemsa bit overrated." Read more

"...Short and very sweet ." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book astonishing, crucial to read, and felicitous. They also appreciate the style and the essay's great picture of contemporary New York's developing character.

"...But how refreshing it is to read such wonderful prose . This is really a 56-page essay between hard covers, rather than a "book."..." Read more

"A classic from the 1940's, "Here is New York," is well thought and well penned ...." Read more

"E.B. White was a very accomplished writer . His books and essays are some the best literature we have...." Read more

"...is not only the truth and insight of White, but his style, his felicity of expression ...." Read more

Customers find the book enjoyable, amusing, and satisfying. They also say it's worth the wait.

"...As such, it's a very easy and exhilarating reading experience and would make a wonderful gift for anyone who loves New York or would like to visit..." Read more

"...A very special book, worth reading and re-reading." Read more

"...Written in the late 40’s. Short but we’ll worth the read ." Read more

"...And if you want to feel the real New York as fast paced and addictive dance , this is the place to do it...." Read more

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"... Short and very sweet." Read more

"Great, short read about life in New York." Read more

"Beautiful, short work by Mr White . I sped through it the first three times I read it. It makes me miss the City...." Read more

"..."Here is New York" is a short read and I plan to re-read it prior to each future visit to NYC." Read more

Customers find the book very original and timeless. They also say it's a great look back at a city.

"...His pieces are either "timeless " (great ones about a range of observations, weather, farming, and delightful ones about animals) or amazingly apt..." Read more

"A really great look back at a great city. Written in the late 40’s. Short but we’ll worth the read." Read more

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"This is a timeless look at New York City . It has the feel for the City and it's people...." Read more

Customers find the setting of the book has the feel of the city and its people. They also say it brings the idea of the City to life.

"...I sped through it the first three times I read it. It makes me miss the City . But it also brings the idea of the City to life...." Read more

"...It is a short read and provides a wonderful feel for the City . It even includes an eery foretelling of a 9/11 event." Read more

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E. B. White is one of the most famous children’s book authors. But he should be better known for his essays.

I was well into adulthood before I realized the co-author of my battered copy of The Elements of Style was also the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web . That’s right, the White of the revered style manual that everyone knew as “Strunk and White” also wrote children’s books…as well as some of the best essays in the English language.

If you’re of a certain age, you might well remember E. B. White’s pointers in The Elements of Style :

Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs; do not overwrite; do not overstate; avoid the use of qualifiers; do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite.

That’s some good advice, much better than the terrible counsel offered on Page 76: “Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute.” Thanks, E. B., I do what I want. ☹️

Born in 1899 in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Elwyn Brooks White attended Cornell University, where he earned the nickname “Andy.” (Weird historical fact: If your last name was White, you were automatically an Andy at Cornell, in honor of the school’s co-founder, Andrew Dickson White. There is no connection to fellow Cornell alum Andy Bernard .) After graduation, White worked as a journalist and an advertising copywriter for several years. He published his first article in The New Yorker the year it was founded, 1925.

White became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1927, but was an early enthusiast of the work-from-home movement, initially refusing to come to the office and eventually agreeing to come in only on Thursdays. In those days, he shared a small office (“a sort of elongated closet,” he called it) with James Thurber.

His famous officemate later recalled that White had an odd a brilliant habit: When visitors were announced, he would climb out the office window and scamper down the fire escape. “He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club,” Thurber later remembered of the chronically shy author. “His life is his own.”

In 1929, White and Thurber co-authored their first book, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do . (Don’t worry: It was comic essays.) That same year, White married Katharine Angell, The New Yorker’s fiction editor from its inaugural year until 1960. She was the mother of Roger Angell , the famed essayist and baseball writer who himself became a fiction editor at The New Yorker in the 1950s.

In 1938, White and Katharine moved permanently to a farm in Maine they had purchased five years before. If you’re wondering about the inspiration for 1952’s Charlotte’s Web , look no further than White’s 1948 essay for The Atlantic, “ Death of a Pig .” (He bought the pig with the intention of fattening it for slaughter; instead, he later nursed it through a fatal illness and buried it on the farm.)

Stuart Little had been published seven years before Charlotte’s Web . Along with 1970’s The Trumpet of the Swan , these books have made White one of the nation’s best-known children’s authors. I’m sure White didn’t mind, but by all rights, he should be better known for his essays. He authored over 20 collections of such classics as “Once More to the Lake,” “The Sea and The Wind That Blow,” “The Ring of Time,” “A Slight Sound at Evening” and “Farewell, My Lovely!” Endlessly anthologized, many are also taught in writing workshops to this day.

In 1949, White published Here Is New York , a short book developed from an essay about the pros and cons of living in New York City. In a 2012 essay for America , literary editor Raymond Schroth, S.J., noted White’s juxtaposition in Here Is New York of technological terrors like nuclear bombers (the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949) with the simple beauties of nature:

Grand Central Terminal has become honky tonk, the great mansions are in decline, and there is generally more tension, irritability and great speed. The subtlest change is that the city is now destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a flock of geese could end this island fantasy, burn the towers and crumble the bridges. But the United Nations will make this the capital of the world. The perfect target may become the perfect “demonstration of nonviolence and racial brotherhood.” A block away in an interior garden was an old willow tree. This tree, symbol of the city, White said, must survive.

“It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it,” White wrote in Here Is New York . “In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.’”

The tree lasted for another six decades —two more than the Cold War, in fact—before finally being chopped down in 2009.

In a 1954 review of books by White and James Michener, America literary editor Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. , said White “has one of the most distinctive styles discernible on the American literary scene.” Since even the most cursory review of Father Gardiner’s many years of commentary shows he hated almost everything, it was quite a compliment. (Later in the review, he noted that “Mr. Michener, who has done better in his other books, comes a cropper here mainly because his style is wooden, sententious and dull.”)

In 1963, White received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his writings. Fifteen years later, he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for “his letters, essays, and the full body of his work.” In 2005, the composer Nico Muhly debuted a song cycle based on The Elements of Style at the New York Public Library. Among its signature moments was a tenor offering more of White’s good advice, this time in song:

Do not use a hyphen between words that can be better written as one word .

White died in 1985 at his farm in Maine. His wife Katharine had died eight years earlier. His obituary in The New York Times quoted William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker:

His literary style was as pure as any in our language. It was singular, colloquial, clear, unforced, thoroughly American and utterly beautiful. Because of his quiet influence, several generations of this country's writers write better than they might have done. He never wrote a mean or careless sentence. He was impervious to literary, intellectual and political fashion. He was ageless, and his writing was timeless.

Our poetry selection for this week is “ Another Doubting Sonnet ,” by Renee Emerson. Readers can view all of America ’s published poems here .

Also, news from the Catholic Book Club: We are reading Norwegian novelist and 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse’s multi-volume work Septology . Click here to buy the book, and click here to sign up for our Facebook discussion group .

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other Catholic Book Club columns:

The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison

What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?

Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review

​​Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a senior editor at America.

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Eighty-Five from the Archive: E. B. White

_This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

Today’s selection is E. B. White’s “ Comment ” from August 18, 1945.

In a 1969 Times interview , the American essayist and stylist E. B. White was asked what he cherished most in life: “I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.” Grave is not typically a term associated with White, who for fifty years was the whimsical, intellectual soul of The New Yorker . From 1925 to 1976 he crafted more than eighteen hundred pieces for the magazine and established, in the words of editor William Shawn, “a new literary form.” That form was the magazine’s Comment essay—a personal essay that was, in White’s hands, light in style yet often weighty in substance. As White noted in a 1969 Paris Review interview, > I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, the youngest of six children. After attending Cornell University, where he acquired the nickname Andy, he worked as a reporter for the United Press and then the Seattle Times , before returning to New York to work at an advertising agency. During this period, he sold a number of poems to Franklin P. Adams’s “The Conning Tower” column. In 1925, he submitted several pieces to The New Yorker , and the following year he took a job at the magazine editing newsbreaks. Ross soon approached White about writing Comment, and it was there that he quickly established the editorial voice of the magazine. As White’s good friend James Thurber observed , in 1938,> Harold Ross and Katharine Angell, his literary editor, were not slow to perceive that here were the perfect eye and ear, the authentic voice and accent for their struggling magazine…. His contributions to the Talk of the Town, particularly his Notes and Comment on the first page, struck the shining note that Ross had dreamed of striking.

In addition to Comment, White also contributed light verse, casuals, longer essays, and captions for cartoons (most famously, “ I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it! ”). His intimate essays, which his stepson, the New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell, once said “took down the fences of manner … and pomposity in writing,” were remarkable examples of White’s ability to relate the quotidian to the topical. In a 1985 Postscript in this magazine, John Updike observed ,> The least pugnacious of editorialists, [White] was remarkably keen and quick in the defense of personal liberty and purity of expression, whether the threat was as overt as McCarthyism or totalitarianism or as seemingly innocuous as … Alexander Woollcott’s endorsement of a brand of whiskey. American freedom was not just a notion to him; it was an instinct, a current in the blood, expressed by his very style and his untrammelled thought, his cunning informality, his courteous skepticism, his boundless and gallant capacity for wonder.

White married Katharine Angell in 1929, the same year that he and Thurber published their satire on Freudianism, “Is Sex Necessary?” In 1938, White and Angell left New York and settled in Maine, where White wrote a monthly column, “One Man’s Meat,” for Harper ’ s magazine. White began writing Comment again for The New Yorker in the spring of 1943, and he also took up writing what would later become a children’s classic, “Stuart Little” (1945), which was soon followed by another classic, “Charlotte’s Web,” published in 1952. Of his children’s writing, White once said , “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.” White continued writing for the magazine until the late seventies, and he was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He died in Maine, on October 1, 1985, at the age of eighty-six.

Today we highlight a Comment that ran in the issue of August 18, 1945. The essay examines White’s visceral skepticism about the beginnings of the atomic age. In this excerpt , White questions just how far man is willing to go in his pursuit of victory:> We thought back over the whole long war, trying to remember the terrible distances and the terrible decisions, the setbacks, the filth and the horror, the bugs, the open wounds, the fellows on the flight decks and on the beaches and in the huts and holes, the resolution and the extra bravery—and all for what? Why, for liberty. “Liberty, the first of blessings, the aspiration of every human soul … every abridgment of it demands an excuse, and the only good excuse is the necessity of preserving it. Whatever tends to preseve this is right, all else is wrong.” And we tried to imagine what it will mean to a soldier, having gone out to fight a war to preserve the world as he knew it, now to return to a world he never dreamt about, a world of atomic designs and portents. Some say this is the beginning of a great time of peace and plenty, because atomic energy is so fearsome no nation will dare unleash it. The argument is fragile. One nation (our own) has already dared take the atom off its leash, has dared crowd its luck, and not for the purpose of conquering the world, merely to preserve liberty.

In England the other day a philosopher and a crystallographer held a debate. The question was whether a halt should be called on science. The discussion was academic, since there is no possibility of doing any such thing. Nevertheless, it was a nice debate. Professor Bernal, the crystallographer, argued that children should be allowed to play with dangerous toys in order that they may learn to use them properly. Joad, the philosopher, said no—science changes our environment faster than we have the ability to adjust ourselves to it. The words were hardly out of his mouth when a blind girl in Albuquerque, noticing a strange brightness in the room, looked up and said, “What was that?” A bomb had exploded a hundred and twenty miles away in the New Mexican desert. And people all over the world were soon to be adjusting themselves to their new environment. For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time, they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed. Today it is not so much the fact of the end of a war which engages us. It is the limitless power of the victor. The quest for a substitute for God ended suddenly. The substitute turned up. And who do you suppose it was? It was man himself, stealing God’s stuff.

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Here Is New York

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Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.166056

dc.contributor.author: E. B. White dc.date.accessioned: 2015-07-07T00:11:54Z dc.date.available: 2015-07-07T00:11:54Z dc.date.digitalpublicationdate: 2004-07-26 dc.date.citation: 1949 dc.identifier: RMSC, IIIT-H dc.identifier.barcode: 2999990038253 dc.identifier.origpath: /data/upload/0038/258 dc.identifier.copyno: 1 dc.identifier.uri: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/166056 dc.description.numberedpages: 54 dc.description.numberedpages: 22 dc.description.scanningcentre: RMSC, IIIT-H dc.description.main: 1 dc.description.tagged: 0 dc.description.totalpages: 76 dc.format.mimetype: application/pdf dc.language.iso: English dc.publisher.digitalrepublisher: Universal Digital Library dc.publisher: Harper Amp Brothers dc.rights: Copyright Protected dc.title: Here Is New York dc.rights.holder: E. B. White

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Poems & Poets

E. B. White

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, children’s writer and poet Elwyn Brooks White was the youngest of six children. He earned a BA at Cornell University. White wrote for the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine and published works of poetry and prose before trying his hand at writing for children.   White’s elegance, simplicity, and dry wit balance both his poetry and prose. Addressing a writer’s need for self-discipline in a Paris Review interview with George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther, White stated, “There are two faces to discipline. If a man [who writes] feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo.… The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds.” At White’s memorial service, William Shawn, the New Yorker editor in chief celebrated White’s achievement: “His literary style was as pure as any in our language. It was singular, colloquial, clear, unforced, thoroughly American and utterly beautiful.”   White published more than a dozen volumes of prose and poetry during his life. His poetry includes The Fox of Peapack, and Other Poems (1938), The Second Tree from the Corner (1954), and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White (1981). His books for children include Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). His prose for adult readers includes One Man’s Meat (1944), Here Is New York (1949), Letters of E.B. White (1976), and Essays of E.B. White (1977). He edited and updated several editions of William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style and co-authored Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (1950) with James Thurber.   White was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. His honors include the National Medal for Literature, a special Pulitzer award, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. He moved with his wife to a farm in North Brooklin, Maine, in 1957, a setting that features prominently in his work. White died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1985.

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The 3 New Yorks (E.B. White)

February 23, 2011 by Andrew Cafourek

“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh yes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

– from “Here Is New York” by E.B. White

Filed Under: Living in New York , NYC Quotes , The Spirt of The City Tagged With: E.B. White , quote

About Andrew Cafourek

Andrew lives in Brooklyn, and just got back from drifting around Eastern Europe for a few months. He makes stuff on the internet including Become A New Yorker , Alumni Spaces and a variety of other goodies with Lat Long .

Andrew came to New York from the Midwest in the fall of 2008 after selling his car for $350... just enough for a one way plane ticket.

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Book review: Here is New York by E.B. White

Literary giant E.B. White takes readers on a quick trip to New York they’ll never forget

I took the Kindle version of E.B. White’s essay Here is New York on the treadmill with me this morning and didn’t want to get off because I dreaded coming to the end of 58 pages of observations so keen they border on prescient.

The lively pace of this book mirrors that of the frenetic city itself with long poetic sentences—with multiple clauses—that keep the reader moving on a memorable journey. There are descriptions of the city’s people, neighborhoods and preoccupations.

White explains how New York is broken down into neighborhoods that are so tight and dense that “by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation.” Yet, its denizens are still able to achieve privacy and anonymity.

He bemoans some of the same changes that still afflict New Yorkers: “There are fewer newspaper than there used to be…” and “Restaurants are hard to get into…” but concludes that “New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere.”

Although written in 1948, White astutely identifies the unique qualities that continue to define New York City. And by any logic, this complicated city shouldn’t work. That it does is remarkable.

The  New Yorker  has called Here is New York “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.” Whether you have visited New York or not, spending a half hour reading this book will be both illuminating and enjoyable.

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I worked in Manhattan once-upon-a-time…the book sounds like one I will definitely be reading. Anyone who can put down on paper what New York City truly is, is a genius!! Great review!

I don’t know how I never read it until now! I’m sure you’ll feel the same way, Marilyn. Best, Irene

This is a find, Irene. What strikes me is White is the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web! Plus a book on the English language. And it kept you on the treadmill!?

If I found books like this, I would exercise more often:-)

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