Mount Vernon, 1908-1917 Summary and Analysis

The first chapter that takes the reader from E.B. White at nine to 18 years old, is prefaced with a brief autobiography of his early years. White reveals that, despite the fact he comes from a loving, caring family, he is from his earliest years dogged with a kind of nameless anxiety that nagged at him constantly. White begins writing while young "to assuage my uneasiness and collect my thoughts," that he was a busy writer well before adolescence. White tells us that his father, Samuel Tilly White, was born into a working class family in Brooklyn, N.Y. and started out as an apprentice in a piano business. He learned everything he could about the piano, as well as how to play it, and was a successful businessman who could afford his family a comfortable upper...