Essays of E.B. White

This collection gathers thirty-one essays by E. B. White, organized not chronologically but by subject, mood, and place across seven sections. The essays span more than four decades, ranging from meditations on rural life and urban energy to reflections on global politics, personal memory, and the craft of writing.

The first section, "The Farm," contains ten essays centered on White's life as a saltwater farmer in North Brooklin, Maine. In "Good-bye to Forty-eighth Street," he recounts the laborious process of emptying his New York apartment as he and his wife, Katharine, prepared to leave the city permanently. He reflects on the near-impossibility of disposing of a lifetime's possessions and describes attending the Fryeburg Fair in Maine, where, on the day the Soviet satellite Sputnik launched, he preferred the view from a Ferris wheel to anything in space. "Home-Coming" describes his arrival at the Maine house on the eve of Thanksgiving, when an accidental chimney fire brought a cheerful visit from the local fire department. He counters a critic's description of the Maine highway as a slum, arguing that familiarity and belonging redeem the landscape's commercial clutter. "Death of a Pig" recounts the illness and death of a pig White had been raising for slaughter, an event that disrupted the familiar rural cycle of buying a spring pig and butchering it in cold weather. Cast unexpectedly as the pig's friend and physician, White administered castor oil, consulted a veterinarian, and watched his old dachshund Fred take perverse delight in the crisis. White frames the pig's death as a confession of failure and grief, writing that the loss he felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. "The Eye of Edna" describes Hurricane Edna's approach to the Maine coast in 1954, focusing as much on the absurdity of radio coverage as on the storm itself: Broadcasters exhausted themselves during the daylight hours of mild weather, and by the time the real blow arrived after dark, the radio had moved on to a glockenspiel performance. "Coon Tree" describes the raccoon living in the big balm-of-Gilead tree, a type of poplar, in front of White's house and pivots to a critique of technological optimism, comparing his two kitchen stoves and arguing that man's real challenge lies in resisting a sterile formula that offers peas without pageantry. "The Geese" tells the story of White's elderly goose's death and his efforts to honor her legacy of three fertile eggs by acquiring goslings for his widowed gander. When the goslings matured and the young gander defeated the old one in a fierce fight, White reflects that he does not know anything sadder than a summer's day.

The second section, "The Planet," shifts outward to global concerns. "Sootfall and Fallout" argues that humanity's gradual contamination of the planet constitutes a grotesque fantasy, and challenges Cold War politicians who speak of national security as though it could be separated from universal well-being. "Unity" contends that disarmament is a mirage and that the West's real challenge is to achieve a political synthesis of liberty and unity, citing the Spanish diplomat Salvador de Madariaga's observation that victory will belong to whichever side first achieves that synthesis. "Bedfellows" uses the ghost of White's deceased dachshund Fred as a lens through which to examine press freedom, political criticism, and the place of religious faith in democracy, arguing that democracy should be a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. "Letter from the East" surveys problems in rural Maine from oil refineries to nuclear power, arguing that what most disturbs people in small towns is the discovery that local autonomy has been compromised by dependence on state and federal money.

The third section, "The City," contains two essays on New York. "The World of Tomorrow" describes White's visit to the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, where he surveyed the exhibits with bemused skepticism and found the General Motors Futurama as reverential as a cathedral. He was most captivated by the American Telephone & Telegraph exhibit, where a small boy named David Wagstaff won a free long-distance call to tell his father about his trip. "Here Is New York," written during a hot summer in 1948, identifies three New Yorks: that of the native, the commuter, and the settler from elsewhere. White argues that the settlers give the city its passion and describes wandering the streets, observing a Goldman Band concert in Central Park, the Bowery at night, and a dance on the Lower East Side. He closes with a prescient passage on the city's vulnerability to aerial destruction, singling out a battered willow tree in Turtle Bay as a symbol of life under difficulties and growth against odds.

The fourth section, "Florida," draws on White's winter stays in the South. "On a Florida Key" describes the cottage, the sulphurous water, and oranges stamped "Color Added," then addresses segregation directly: White recounts sitting through a patriotic newsreel proclaiming liberty and justice for all in a theater that barred Black patrons, unable to bring himself to applaud. "The Ring of Time" watches a teenage circus rider practice in a shabby training ring in Sarasota and meditates on the passage of time, while also observing the quiet mechanics of racial segregation. "What Do Our Hearts Treasure?" describes a Christmas spent in a rented Florida house equipped with every modern appliance but lacking warmth, until a package arrived from Maine containing a balsam fir branch, sleigh bells, and a tiny red drum made by a grandchild.

The fifth section, "Memories," looks back at White's past. "Afternoon of an American Boy" recalls his audacious adolescent plan to take Eileen Thomas, a neighbor girl, to a tea dance at the Plaza Hotel despite not knowing how to dance. "Farewell, My Lovely!" is an affectionate elegy for the Model T Ford, cataloging its planetary transmission, its aftermarket accessories, and the folklore surrounding its mechanical temperament. "The Years of Wonder" reconstructs White's accidental 1923 voyage to Alaska aboard the S.S. Buford, a former troop carrier chartered by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Fired from his newspaper job and adrift, the 23-year-old White boarded as a paying passenger. At Skagway, Captain Lane summoned him to the bridge and offered him a position as night saloonsman, the crewman who tended the ship's saloon after hours. White was later reassigned to firemen's messboy, serving meals to the ship's firemen at the lowest social level of the vessel, and experienced elation during a North Pacific gale. "Once More to the Lake" describes a return with his young son to the Maine lake where White vacationed as a child. He finds the place largely unchanged and sustains the illusion that his son is himself and he is his own father, until, watching the boy pull on cold, wet swimming trunks after a thunderstorm, he feels in his own body the chill of death.

The sixth section, "Diversions and Obsessions," contains two essays on White's lifelong passions. "The Sea and the Wind That Blows" reflects on his compulsive relationship with sailing, describing how, now in his seventies, he still raises his sail in fear though he has come to dislike the wind. "The Railroad" mourns the impending death of passenger rail service in Maine, recalling his first train journey in 1905 and arguing that a state without rail service is coming apart at the seams.

The final section, "Books, Men, and Writing," gathers six literary essays. "The St. Nicholas League" recalls the children's literary club associated with St. Nicholas Magazine, where future luminaries including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ring Lardner, and Robert Benchley published their first work. "A Slight Sound at Evening" is a centennial appreciation of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, written from a boathouse roughly the same size as Thoreau's cabin; White argues that the book is the best youth's companion yet written by an American and imagines bringing Thoreau back to witness the modern world. "Some Remarks on Humor" proposes that humorists are not simply sad people but individuals more sensible of life's deep vein of melancholy who compensate for it actively. "Don Marquis" pays tribute to the creator of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat, whose daily newspaper column in the New York Sun represented an era when columnists were expected to be scholars and poets. "Will Strunk" recalls White's Cornell professor William Strunk Jr., whose 43-page handbook The Elements of Style commanded brevity with such force that Strunk uttered every sentence three times to fill the silence his own concision created. "Mr. Forbush's Friends" celebrates the ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush and his three-volume Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, assembling a gallery of amateur tipsters who reported extraordinary bird behavior, from a loon rinsing its mouth to siskins pulling a late sleeper's hair.