It’s the birthday of E.B. White (1899-1985), best known for his classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web (1952) and for The Elements of Style (published privately in 1919 by William Strunk, expanded and revised in 1959 by White), both of which have sold millions of copies.

Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the sixth child of the family, which White claimed accounted for his first name: “My mother just hung it on me because she’d run out of names.” He studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1921), worked around as an editor and reporter, and landed at The New Yorker in 1927, where he remained for life. White and his colleague James Thurber, under the editorship of Harold Ross, are generally credited with having the greatest influence on The New Yorker’s character.

In 1929, White married Katherine Sergeant Angell, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor and a divorced mother of two who was six years his senior; Katherine was known as “the intellectual soul” of the magazine. In the 1930s the Whites moved from Manhattan to an old farmhouse in Maine. The barn was inspiration for many of the characters in White’s children’s stories. White and Katherine were married until her death in 1977. The next year White assembled his wife’s New Yorker essays on gardening into a book, Onward and Upward in the Garden (1978), and wrote in the introduction, “Life without Katherine is no good for me.” (I’m just going to say it: that is damn sweet. Forty-eight years of marriage.) That same year, White received a special Pulitzer Prize “for his letters, essays and the full body of his work.” (Would it have killed the good people at Pulitzer to throw an Oxford comma in there? Have they never read Strunk and White?)

Charlotte’s Web, along with White’s other children’s books (Stuart Little, 1945, and The Trumpet of the Swan, 1970), elicited so many letters from children that Harper & Row finally started sending printed replies from White.

White had Alzheimer’s disease when he died at his home at 86. He was called “one of the nation’s most precious literary resources.”

Read something beautifully written this fine Wednesday, write something well yourself, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.