Down with Strunk and White
E.B. White was the author of two delightful children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, perhaps three if you count the lesser known The Trumpet of the Swan. White also wrote a great many not-so-memorable but often anthologized New Yorker and Harper’s essays. But he is best known to generations of American students as the co-author of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The man whose name comes first on that pamphlet-sized compendium of do’s and don’ts, is William Strunk Jr., a Cornell English professor for forty-six years who would have sunk forever in death’s dateless night were it not for White’s sentimental resurrection of him in the pamphlet’s six-page introduction.
