Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Essays of E.B. White” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Essays of E.B. White

E.B. White

4.31 · Rating details · 2,943 ratings · 293 reviews

The classic collection by one of the greatest essayists of our time.

Get A Copy

Or buy for

Paperback, 384 pages

Published December 12th 2006 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (first published May 16th 1936)

More Details... edit details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Essays of E.B. White, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

I Love New York City

578 books — 335 voters

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Best Book of Essays

247 books — 141 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

4.31 ·

Rating details

· 2,943 ratings · 293 reviews

Filter

Sort order

Oct 22, 2018 Diane Barnes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: slow-reads, favorites

These essays are the reason I love reading essays to begin with. Five or ten minutes in the company of Mr. White's opinions, written by the master stylist that he is, leaves me feeling happy, refreshed, relaxed, and most of the time, amused. They are wonderful and he wrote a lot of them during his time at the New Yorker, so I don't have to stop with this book.

flag 33 likes · Like · see review

Jan 01, 2017 Roy Lotz rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: americana, nature-writing, person-of-letters, prose-style, new-yawk

There is really no way for a man to put his arms around a big house plant and still remain a gentleman.

E.B. White’s name, along with Will Strunk’s, is now synonymous with good style. If that isn’t a compliment to a writer, I don’t know what is.

My first encounter with the duo was in my high school English class of junior year. My teacher was old-fashioned enough to believe that we should learn how to use punctuation. This came as a shock, since none of her predecessors had spared so much as a moment on a semicolon. It was with bewilderment and wonder, then, that I opened up The Elements of Style and encountered this sentence: “The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semicolon, and more formality than the dash.” How often is so much instruction packed into so few words?

In college I picked up the habit of rereading Strunk and White at least once a year. Probably I should do so more often, since verbal profligacy—Strunk’s sworn enemy, the capital sin of writing—is something that I can’t seem to shake, no matter how often I try. One of the reasons I picked up this book was the hope that, by observing White at work, his example might serve where his precepts failed.

With White, the style is the man; and any discussion of his works inevitably becomes an analysis of his prose. To begin with, White is not what I’d call a vocal writer. A vocal writer is one whose writing seems to come alive and speak, whose writing cannot be read in your own voice, only in the author’s own accent. White’s writing, while personable, charming, and full of feeling, does not leap from the page into your living room. It is writerly writing.

His style is conversational, not aphoristic. His sentences are not pointed, his wit is not barbed, his lines are not militantly memorable. His writing is loose; it breathes like a cotton shirt; it is drafty like an old wooden cabin. You might say that his essays are a controlled ramble, a balancing act that looks like a casual stroll. They take their time. Like a scatterbrained errand boy, they pause in a thousand places for momentary rendezvous and covert dalliances before reaching their destinations.

White seldom speaks in abstractions, and hardly makes an argument. His writing is held together not by the logic of ideas but by the tissue of memory. This is partly why the style is unfilterable from the content. There is no thesis to take away. He is not trying to make a point, but to communicate his perspective, to encapsulate a piece of his personality.

White’s personality is delightful. Modest and gently humorous, he is animated by a curiosity for the little things that comprise his world. He can study a train schedule with avidity, he can spend hours gazing at a spider’s web, he can write poetry on the life-cycle of a pig. This is what makes him such a consummate essayist. In the humdrum facts and quotidian occurrences of life he hears music and meaning, and spiderlike weaves his own web to stitch them into a delicate structure:

As I sat at table, gnawing away at a piece of pie, snow began falling. At first it was an almost imperceptible spitting from the gray sky, but it soon thickened and came driving in from the northeast. I watched it catch along the edge of the drive, powder the stone wall, and whiten the surface of the dark frozen pond, and I knew that all along the coast from Kittery on, the worst mistakes of men were being quietly erased, the lines of their industrial temples softened, and U.S. 1 crowned with a cold, inexpensive glory

There is not much to be said against these essays, except what can be said against all stylists. Since what White says is less important than the way he says it, upon finishing the reader is left with nothing but echoes and aftertastes. Yet it is a delicious aftertaste, tart and tangy with a touch of smoke, and it whets my appetite for more. ...more

flag 21 likes · Like · see review

Jul 12, 2017 Rebecca McNutt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, classic, memoir

From the author of Charlotte's Web, this collection of essays is as powerful as it is original, and definitely a classic in every sense of the word.

flag 18 likes · Like · see review

Apr 23, 2010 Joe rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Like the majority of American liberal artists, I know E.B. White principally from his editorial work. The Elements of Style was the principal explicit force behind my own understanding of the sentence and the essay, and I assumed its writer would possess that bright cogency that tickles the alert reader into giggles.

I also knew E.B. White as the author of books for children, and though it has been nearly two decades since I read Charlotte's Web, I remember vividly the story and the prematurely Like the majority of American liberal artists, I know E.B. White principally from his editorial work. The Elements of Style was the principal explicit force behind my own understanding of the sentence and the essay, and I assumed its writer would possess that bright cogency that tickles the alert reader into giggles.

I also knew E.B. White as the author of books for children, and though it has been nearly two decades since I read Charlotte's Web, I remember vividly the story and the prematurely deep emotion it aroused.

Lastly, I knew E.B. White was the resident essayist for years at the New Yorker, and I had read a piece or two of his during college and graduate writing programs, and found them—as I expected from the editor of the Elements of Style—to be refined and distinct, even if I believed they were too patricianly contented for my taste.

Now, I've worked my way through this collection concurrently with David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and I couldn't think of a more illuminating contrast. Both artists reside within a tiny honored circle of American essayists. Both artists, per William Strunk's instruction, labor to omit needless words. Both artists ask that every word tell. But Wallace crams his sentences full of meaning, each written as though it would be his last and only, while E.B. White seems to let some sentences breathe the open air. What's more, Wallace often mercilessly whips his essay, even his day-to-day accounts, in pursuit of his philosophical rabbit. He is as methodical as the baseline tennis player of his teenage years, piling precise sentence on sentence, calculating and increasing the advantageous angles, till triumph is inevitable. E.B. White seems, by contrast, to be at times an amnesiac playing billiards with one hand: scattering the balls, then studying them, judging their position anew, and firing away.

In his missives from Maine, for instance, White will digress into accounts on the weather, reports on egg production, measurements of snowfall and the tides, before meandering to his point. But when White finally finds the balls aligned to his liking, he strikes with such a devastatingly beautiful, caroming shot! Consider his essay, "Death of a Pig," filled with mournful puns (such a thing is possible!), portraits of gruff veterinarians and sympathetic neighbors, explanations of his farm's terrain. It seems a sweet, orchard-smelling essay, but comes around to a gorgeous and devastating final sentence comparing the curious spirit of his daschund Fred and the haunting regret he, as a failed caretaker, feels at his pig's inescapable death: "The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing." Even pulled from context, the lovely pace and light, precise kiss of this sentence takes away your breath. Within the slow, sad, wandering story, it is devastatingly melancholic.

Or, consider the lively and humorous essay on the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, NY, which pokes gentle fun at the antiseptic world of tomorrow. And at the end, the essay arrives the peculiar image of a couple of bare-breasted "Amazon" girls sitting in a robot automaton's giant rubber palm: a silly image, ripe for the simple, sly irony and gentle humanism that characterizes an essay filled with tots making long distance phone calls, cracks about the rainy weather. But White opts, in the last sentence, to just put aside the nibbles of soft irony and just take one voracious bite. And so, from nothing: "Here was the Fair, all fairs, in pantomime; and here the strange mixed dream that made the Fair: the heroic man, bloodless and perfect and enormous, created in his own image, and in his hand (rubber, aseptic) the literal desire, the warm and living breast."

And just one more, to really amaze you, the final two paragraphs of an essay ostensibly about Ford's discontinuation of the Model T line, the car of White's (and, in a sense, modern America's) youth:

"Springtime in the heyday of the Model T was a delirious season. Owning a car was still a major excitement, roads were wonderful and bad. The Fords were obviously conceived in madness: any car which was capable of going from forward into reverse without any perceptible mechanical hiatus was bound to be a mighty challenging thing to the human imagination. Boys used to veer them off the highway into a level pasture and run wild with them, as though they were cutting up with a girl....

The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since. I suppose it's time to say good-bye. Farewell, my lovely!"

Well, what about that!
...more

flag 17 likes · Like · see review

Jun 12, 2017 Cheryl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: to-enjoy-again

Especially for "Mr Forbush's Friends...."
-----------
Ok, wow. So many observations, some made eight decades ago, are still relevant. The very first, about how 'stuff' accumulates so that when one tries to move to a new home one has to take the time to review one's life, is gorgeous. ("Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street") That whole first section, on farming, is a must-read for fans of Michael Perry. The tale of his trip to Alaska, as a callow youth in the early 20s, is memorable. There are some refe ...more

flag 16 likes · Like · see review

Jun 04, 2017 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Shelves: bio, usa, short, 2017-read, audible-uk, classics

Keep in mind that usually I do not enjoy either essays or short stories, but here the writing is exceptional. It is this that makes all the difference.

The essays cover many different topics, such as the art of writing, appreciation of life’s small delights, wildlife (animals, flowers, birds), books and authors such as The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis, Henry David Thoreau aand The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr., trips to Alaska and Florida, the tribulations of a ...more

flag 14 likes · Like · see review

Jan 15, 2019 Terri rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: writer-e-b-white, non-fiction-essays

"Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White is one my favorite books from childhood and thinking about the book continues to give me a warm feeling. He wrote for the magazine "The New Yorker" starting in 1927 where he met his wife who edited his work. Some of the witty and descriptive essays in this book appeared in different publications as well as the "New Yorker." Reading this book is a pleasure and treat in every way. Charming book. Highly recommend.

flag 14 likes · Like · see review

Feb 08, 2012 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2011

Here are some of the opening sentences found in this collection of essays.

To come upon an article in the Times called "The Meaning of Brown Eggs" was an unexpected pleasure.
Someone told me the other day that a seagull won't eat a smelt.
I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig.
Mosquitoes have arrived with the warm nights, and our bedchamber is their theater under the stars.
I wasn't really prepared for the World's Fair last week, and it certainly wasn't prepared for ...more

flag 10 likes · Like · see review

Apr 15, 2017 Chris J rated it liked it · review of another edition

Yo, Goodreads I.T. - give me the opportunity to give half-stars! It's like...2017 or something. This book is a classic 3.5 stars. When forced to round, I must round down.

Mr. White was a wonderful essayist. This particular collection contains more than a few gems but is too inconsistent to make the entire volume a ' must read.' Yet, even as I write that last sentence, I doubt myself for I did enjoy the book and am quite thankful that I read it.

I will say that this collection has inspired me to ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Aug 07, 2014 Antigone rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essays-shorts

If you occasionally find your foot lost of its purchase on the bicycle pedal while speeding down a death-defying San Francisco hill - minus the bicycle and minus the hill - then the essays of E.B. White should be immediately looked into. White's work is thoroughly grounding. Whether he's enumerating the pleasures of his Home Crawford 8-20 wood-burning kitchen stove, his boulder in the pasture woods where he retreats when he's disenchanted or frightened, his geese, his pig, the local raccoon, his ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Mar 28, 2010 Andrew rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

I took my time reading these essays, one at a time, over the past summer. It ended up being one of the best reading experiences I've had.

To quote E.B. White - "As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."

That's exactly the thought behind each of these pieces, and reading them, you're always anxious to discover whic ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Aug 26, 2008 Rosemary rated it it was amazing

It turns out E. B. White is clever, warm, and eloquent-- as the writer of Elements of Style ought to be. He writes about pretty much everything: books, politics, the city, the country, his rattletrap car, the debate on brown vs. white eggs, all with both ease and conviction.

"All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it there, if you dig around." That's what E. B. White has to say for himself. And if you don't love the world already, reading these essays ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Jan 24, 2018 Eryn rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned, classics, fiction, reviewed, 3-stars, average

I like Charlotte's Web but, I feel like the majority of his other writing is dry.

Read for class.

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Sep 22, 2016 Amy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: the-true-story-of

E.B. White may best be known as the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, but he had a prolific writing career. In this collection he has chosen his favorite selections to include from a lifetime of writing. He based his selections on his own enjoyment upon re-reading and on their durability.

The selections here are varied and cover White's time in Maine, Florida and New York. White experienced life both on a small farm and in the big cities and essays of both are included here. They are p ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Aug 31, 2017 Bonny rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, non-fiction

I am continually amazed by and incredibly appreciative of E.B. White's writing, no matter whether his subject is spiders, pigs, roofing the barn, hurricanes, or war. He started writing essays around 1930 and continued for decades; his children's fiction was published about 70 years ago, and his writing is still relevant today and has so much to offer current readers.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are th

...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jan 16, 2011 Kris rated it it was amazing

I knew this would be a five-star book after reading the very first line. I often find that a large amount of non-fiction books are written by people who White calls (himself included), "sustained by the childish belief that everything he or she thinks is of general interest." So White admits this elephant in the room straight away, so you can get on with reading the rest of his works. It is quite amazing how, though he wrote closer over half a century ago, many of the ideas he discusses are stil ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jan 24, 2019 Anima rated it liked it · review of another edition

‘We had been having an unseasonable spell of weather—hot, close days, with the fog shutting in every night, scaling for a few hours in midday, then creeping back again at dark, drifting in first over the trees on the point, then suddenly blowing across the fields, blotting out the world and taking possession of houses, men, and animals. Everyone kept hoping for a break, but the break failed to come. Next day was another hot one.’
‘I hung up. My throat felt dry and I went to the cupboard and got a ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 13, 2008 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essays, nonfiction

I picked up this book for three reasons: simple booklust; my life-long infatuation with E.B. White's writing; and the inclusion of the essay "Here is New York."

In the preface, White wrote of "Here is New York" that it had been seriously affected by the passage of time, and that the city he described in the summer of 1948 seemed to him to have disappeared and been reborn. But a lot of it still sounds right to me.

Here, then, are the opening lines of "Here is New York":

"On any person who desires s ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jan 24, 2016 Wendy Pitts rated it liked it

Full disclosure I did not read ALL the essays but, the ones I read I did enjoy. This is not really my type of book. Rather dense reading where you have to slow down and pay attention to detail because White is very witty. Enjoyable slow read.

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Apr 26, 2012 Barbara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: re-reading

i read this to learn how it's done when it's done in finest form. i read this to shout hallelujah at the end of a marvelous sentence, or at the choice of a word that takes my breath away. i read this to wipe tears from my cheeks. i read this to laugh out loud and mercilessly.

this book is the holy mecca for those of us who can't stop believing in the power of word to burrow deep within the human heart and take us hostage, to clomp onto a brain cell and draw pictures we've never seen before. the ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 16, 2016 Darla rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, classics

I had a difficult time rating this book. There were a handful of essays I really liked--mostly the autobiographical ones. I always think of EBW as a kind grandfatherly figure, but he lived quite the eclectic, adventurous, activist life. He is the "White" in Strunk and White's"Elements of Style." I often thought of his political essays -- the more things change the more they stay the same. However there were many essays that just didn't seem relevant or interesting to me. When I did a mathematica ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 13, 2016 Kathy rated it it was amazing

I am not an essay fan or a short fan but you cannot get better than E. B. White's essays. I can't believe I've gone 65 years without anyone suggesting I read them. They're fabulous and in both political and environmental they're unfortunately very much on target. Sometimes it was hard to believe I was reading a piece written 50 plus years ago and not written recently.

I highly recommend them to anyone.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 25, 2016 Jana Light rated it really liked it

E.B. White is so good at describing the seemingly-mundane, not in a way that transforms it into something magical, but in a way that simply brings to light all that is actually going on in the world around us. I want to develop his poetically scientific (or is that scientifically poetic?) eye and appetite for what the world has to offer. It's damn near spiritual.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 06, 2015 Dave rated it it was amazing

E. B. White was a great essayist. If you want to spend a month reading an essay every morning I highly recommend this book. Whether it was observations of life on the farm and by the sea in Maine, or the ever changing world of New York in the 1930's - 60's, White does a masterful job of describing what he sees and experiences. Read this.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Apr 23, 2015 Juliana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen."

One of the purest, loveliest writers I've ever encountered. This was worth the time it took to read, and I have a feeling I'll be dipping into it again and again.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Mar 01, 2016 Lorraine rated it it was amazing

I read this a long time ago, and I believe it is time to revisit it. I remember reading one essay a night right before bed. It was like treating myself to a piece of great dark chocolate before bed.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 31, 2018 Victoria Miller rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

It took me so long to finish this book, because I didn't want it to end. Having acquired several more books of this lovely man's writing, I finally braved the final essay. E.B. White is without a doubt one of my favorite writers. In fact, I'm still humming 'Getting to Know You', even though, alas, he has not been with us since 1985. E.B. White was a writer for The New Yorker magazine from its beginning in 1925; however,even before that he was quite the adventurer. One of the most delightful and ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Feb 18, 2018 Geoff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Having just finished reading "The Essays of E.B. White", I feel as though I have lost a friend. I can't recall ever feeling so sad at finishing a book-- not because the book itself was sad, but because it was wonderful, and its author was wonderful. I grew up with White's three children's books-- which I still love now as an adult-- but I had only read one of his essays ("Once More to the Lake") before this. To be fair, I will admit that I didn't love every bit of every single essay, but every e ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jun 30, 2018 Joseph rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Forty-four years ago, my English Comp professor dissected White's "This is New York" as an example of what it means to write well. I've loved White's work ever since, and it was now high time I reread some of his best essays. Truly a master of the form.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Oct 25, 2017 Larry Putt rated it it was amazing

E.B. White is a master of the essay. I found the essays of his time on his farm to be both heartfelt and amusing. When I finished the book I felt sad because it was like I was saying goodbye to an old friend.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend It | Stats | Recent Status Updates

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

Writing > Essays

223 users

Nonfiction

142 users

Classics

36 users

Autobiography > Memoir

21 users

Language > Writing

20 users

See top shelves…

About E.B. White

E.B. White

1,749 followers

Elwyn Brooks White was a leading American essayist, author, humorist, poet and literary stylist and author of such beloved children's classics as Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. He graduated from Cornell University in 1921 and, five or six years later, joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine. He authored over seventeen books of prose and poetry and was elected to t ...more

Books by E.B. White

Three Beloved Classics by E. B. White: Charlotte's Web/the Trumpet of the Swan/Stuart Little

More…

Trivia About Essays of E.B. White

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from Essays of E.B. White

“One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.” — 162 likes

“The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)” — 34 likes

More quotes…