Generally recognized as one of the best essayists of the twentieth century, E. B. White was also a major force in the success of the New Yorker magazine, a writer of some of the best children's stories of our time, an inspiring advocate of world federalism, and, among other things, a spokesman for individualism and the right of privacy. He is, in E. M. Forster's sense of the word, one of the aristocracy of "the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky." Not a bohemian or an expatriate in the 1920s, nor a Marxist in the 1930s, not a joiner, and not easily classified, he is a true individualist. And at the same time, he has also been, although not exclusively so, a notable humorist.

White was born in Mount Vernon, New York; the youngest of six children of Samuel T. and Jessie Hart White, he grew up in...