ELWYN BROOKS WHITE was born in Mount Vernon, New York in 1899 and graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1921. While at Cornell, he worked as editor of The Cornell Daily Sun with classmate Allison Danzig who later became a sportswriter for The New York Times. White was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. He wrote for The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer and worked as an ad man before returning to New York City in 1924.

He published his first article in The New Yorker magazine in 1925, then joined the staff in 1927 and continued to contribute for six decades. Best recognized for his essays and unsigned "Notes and Comment" pieces, he gradually became the most important contributor to The New Yorker at a time when it was arguably the most important American literary magazine. He also served as a columnist for Harper's Magazine from 1938 to 1943.

In the late 1930s, White turned his hand to children's fiction on behalf of a niece, Janice Hart White. His first children's book, Stuart Little, was published in 1945, and Charlotte's Web appeared in 1952. Both were highly acclaimed and in 1970, jointly won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a major prize in the field of children's literature. In the same year, he published his third children's novel, The Trumpet of the Swan. In 1959, White edited and updated The Elements of Style. This handbook of grammatical and stylistic correctness for writers of American English had been written and published in 1918 by William Strunk, Jr., one of White's professors at Cornell. In 1978, White won a special Pulitzer Prize for his work as a whole. Other awards he received included a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

White married Katharine Sergeant Angell in 1929. She was also an editor at The New Yorker, and author (as Katharine White) of Onward and Upward in the Garden. They had a son, Joel White, a naval architect and boatbuilder, who owned Brooklin Boatyard in Brooklin, Maine. Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, has spent decades as a fiction editor for The New Yorker and is well-known as the magazine's baseball writer.

E. B. White died on October 1, 1985, at his farm home in North Brooklin, Maine.

                              -Biography & Portraits from Internet Sources