Author of the popular and award-winning children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White ’21 was the editor-in-chief of The Sun during his senior year at Cornell. Nicknamed Andy by his fellow staffers at The Sun for having the same last name as Cornell’s co-founder Andrew Dickson White, Elwyn Brooks White went on after his graduation to write for the The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer for several years.

Moving back to New York in 1924, White wrote a series of essays and articles for The New Yorker when the magazine had become one of the most influential of its kind. Partly as a result of his fame, he became a columnist for Harper’s Magazine from 1938 to 1943.

In 1938, White moved to Maine where he kept various animals on his farm, many of which appeared in his books. In the late 1930s, White began to write down the children’s tales he told his young nieces and nephews. He began writing Stuart Little, his first children’s book, in hopes of entertaining his six-year-old niece, but he completed it after she had grown up. A book about a shy, good-natured, young New Yorker with the temperament of a mouse who goes on adventures with a bird named Margolo, Stuart Little was ultimately published in 1945.

The observations that he made of the pigs and spiders on his farm became the inspiration for Charlotte’s Web, which was published in 1952. A story of a spider named Charlotte who helps a pig named Wilbur escape certain death by being eaten, Charlotte’s Web, along with Stuart Little, came to be considered classics of children’s literature. Both books were highly acclaimed and remain popular children’s books even today. In 1970, White won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, an award given to writers or illustrators in recognition of their lasting contributions to children’s literature. White published his third book, The Trumpet of the Swan, in the same year. Three years later, White received both the Seqouyah Award and the William Allen White Award for writing The Trumpet of the Swan.

In 1959, White revised and republished The Elements of Style, a handbook of English grammar rules originally published by one of his Cornell professors, William Strunk Jr, in 1918. The handbook was known as “the little book” that eventually became required reading at many American college English classes over the years.

White was named by President John F. Kennedy as one of 31 Americans to receive the Presidential Medal for Freedom in 1963 for his overall contribution to American literature, and in 1971 received the National Medal for Literature. He was named one of 50 members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. White also received honorary degrees from seven colleges and universities. He wrote 20 books of prose and poetry, including One Man’s Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E.B. White, The Essays of E.B. White and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White.

White was also identified as a humorist, known to have wryly proclaimed, “A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist — nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.” He continued to write until his death on Oct. 1, 1985.