It’s the birthday of William Strunk Jr. (1869-1946), who in 1919, while a professor of English at Cornell University, wrote and self-published The Elements of Style, a guide to English usage and composition; he intended the book only as an in-house guide. Strunk’s student, E. B. White, revised and expanded the book forty years later, and since 1959 it has sold more than 10 million copies and become known simply as Strunk and White.

Dorothy Parker wrote, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Strunk was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He got a bachelor’s from the University of Cincinnati (1890), taught math for a year at Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana (wha—?!), then went to Cornell for his doctorate (1896) and stayed on to teach English there for the rest of his life. (He tossed in a year of study at the University of Paris in 1898-99.) He married Olivia Emilia Locke in 1906 and they had three children.

In 1935-36, Strunk was the literary consultant for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Romeo and Juliet (1936) and was supposedly known in the studio simply as “the professor” because he “looked as though he’d been delivered to the set from MGM’s casting department.” (That’s from Wikipedia. Whenever I use Wikipedia, I feel like I have to admit it.)

In 2005, the artist Maira Kalman published The Elements of Style with illustrations rendered in gouache. The illustrations are often sly and playful and range from “hilariously literal” to abstract.

The Elements of Style celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009. Strunk himself is remembered at Cornell for “his kindness, his helpfulness as a teacher and colleague, his boyish lack of envy and guile.”

Have a splendid Monday this first day of July and stay scrupulously honest to the data.