Charlotte's Web author E. B. White has delighted people of all ages with his essays, poems, and classic children's stories since the 1920s. He was one of the early New Yorker writers and helped set the tone that established it as the magazine of elegant writing that it continued to be for decades.

Elwyn Brooks White graduated from Cornell University, where he was the editor of the Cornell Sun. He worked as a journalist and a copywriter in an advertising agency before joining the infant New Yorker in 1926. (Katharine Angell, who hired him, later became his wife.) From 1938-43, White contributed the monthly column "One Man's Meat" to Harper's magazine.

White's elegant yet informal, humorous, and humanitarian writing covered diverse subjects. Following the premature death of a pig in 1947 at the Whites' rural home in Maine, White said he wrote an essay...