“Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.” – E.B. White, “Charlotte’s Web”

Even though he wasn’t born here, E.B. White lived for nearly 50 years on a farm in Brooklin, Maine, and did almost all of his best work here. That said, I thought I’d take a brief look at the life of one of Maine’s favorite writers.

Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1899. After graduating from Cornell University in 1921, he roamed across America taking jobs as a reporter and freelance writer.

In 1927 White landed a job at The New Yorker, the magazine with which he’d spend his entire career, working first as a writer and contributing editor, and later as a monthly columnist right up to his death. In the witty pieces he produced, he mused about everything from life in the city to literature and politics.

After more than a decade in New York he came to the realization that “I was stuck with the editorial ‘we,’ a weasel word suggestive of corporate profundity or institutional consensus. I wanted to write as straight as possible, with no fuzziness.” (Later in the book “The Elements of Style,” he opined, “Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say ‘Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!’”)

So, in 1938, he moved to a saltwater farm in Brooklin, where he lived until his passing in 1985. As he was about to leave the big city, Harper’s magazine offered him the princely sum of $300 a month (over $6,000 in today’s dollars) if he’d send them monthly essays about rural life.

Fifty-five of those essays would be collected in White’s 1942 book “One Man’s Meat.” Forty years later he’d write in his introduction to the book’s revised edition, “Once in everyone’s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years (1938–1942) in Maine as the time when this happened to me. . . . I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment.”

Still, White said he found writing difficult and bad for one’s disposition, saying, “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.” But he kept at it. He began writing “Stuart Little” as a story for a 6-year-old niece of his, but before he’d finished it in 1945 she had grown up. “I am still encouraged to go on,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where else to go.”

“If the world were merely seductive,” he concluded, “that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

“Stuart Little” was followed in 1952 by “Charlotte’s Web,” the poignant children’s classic about the friendship between Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig. After those books came “The Trumpet of the Swan” in 1970, the same year he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web.”

In his New Yorker column of July 27, 1957, White praised a 43-page handbook on good writing written by his former professor, William Strunk Jr., as “a summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” Two years later Macmillan and Co. published White’s revision of Strunk’s 1935 edition of “The Elements of Style.” White’s expanded version (my 1979 third edition comes in at 85 pages not counting the index) went on to sell more than 2 million copies.

“Vigorous writing is concise,” he wrote in his revisions. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

And if you’re a writer, remember that “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.”

I’ll leave you with two of what I think are the best pieces of E.B. White’s advice: “The best writing is rewriting,” and “Use the smallest word that does the job.”

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.

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