Books by E.B. White

“There was a full cast version of Charlotte’s Web a few years ago. It starts out with a pig that is about to die, so that’s a little scary, but it’s a nice audiobook and it’s good to have an audio version of such a familiar story.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks for a Family Road Trip

Emily Connelly, Journalist

“White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and Beerbohm suddenly look stuffy and literary. White has an amazing ability, which I still marvel at, to come very close to a faux-naïve simplicity that’s excessive and then pull it back.” Read more...

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections

Adam Gopnik, Journalist

“It’s a great snapshot of how the city changes slightly over time, and I guess that’s why people say it’s a letter—because he’s revisiting it. It’s not formally a letter, of course, but White is coming back to New York, and he’s grappling with his own memories. In my book, I say a lot of letters are about longing and missing things, and that’s certainly the case here, in that White is having these memories and trying to square them with how things have changed.” Read more...

The best books on New York City

Ben Greenman, Biographer