IN HIS NEW BIOGRAPHY of E.B. White, author Scott Elledge reports a remark about White which the poet Adrienne Rich made in a letter to Katharine Angell. White's late wife. Rich said "she thought, without detracting an inch from H.D.T., that it must be a good deal more difficult to be E.B. White in the 20th century than Henry Thoreau in the 19th ... How's this? Is White a troubled or oppressed American? Famous as a stylist, essayist, and author of children's books. White has long been identified with the The New Yorker. America's most prestigious and profitable magazine, for which he has worked much of his adult life. It is difficult to imagine White weighed down with worries.

And yet, judging from the attacks on White which Elledge relates, twentieth-century Americans have not always liked White. In 1935, when The New Yorker was nine years old, both White and his wife Katharine Angell, together with their mutual friend James Thurber, had been making names for themselves through their work on the magazine. Desiring to be both witty and disinterested, informative but sophisticated. The New Yorker:

made it its policy from the start to stay away from solemn discussions of the great issues and problems of the day, on the grounds that such discussions had no place in its humorous pages.

Several people attacked this policy. Ralph Ingersoll, a friend of White's, published a polemic against the magazine in Fortune that year. He wrote personally of White that:

He is shy, frightened of life, often melancholy, always hypochondriac.... The record of E.B. White's absorptions is written for all to see in "Notes and Comment" first his Scottish terriers, then his guppies, more recently a serious interest in economics--and a continuation of his long campaign against war.

Most of The New Yorker's vices, as Ingersoll told it, were the fault of the White family:

If you complain that The New Yorker has become gentler and gentler, more nebulous, less real, it is the Whites doing: Andy's gossamer writing, in his increasingly important "Notes and Comment," and in his flavoring of the whole magazine with captions and fillers. Katharine's ... civilizing influence on Ross.

No-one would assert that White's life has been traumatic. But White's mental and physical vulnerability to such attacks has caused most of the troubles of his adult life. These troubles stand out in a story one naively imagines as placid. Indeed, it is the achievement of biographer Elledge that he conveys not only what White has done or meant but what it must be like to be White. He does not simply transcribe the hard facts of accomplishment, tempting though this might be when the subject is alive, he also captures the fluctuating essence of White's predominantly genial character

WHITE'S CHILDHOOD seems to have been happy. He was born in 1899, "in the fashionable section of Mounte Vemon. New York," to loving and prosperous parents Elwyn Brooks White was the sixth and youngest child of his family. His father taught him" to respect the responsibilities of the head of a family as well as the rights of all its members to privacy, independence, and self-realization.... But much more important, during his most impressionable years, he learned from his father to be an optimist, and to believe in his luck." From his mother, White seems to have received his unpretentiousness and his love for the natural world.

By the time White was in his teens, the lineaments of his mature character were visible. He was not weak, but was never in good health. He was fascinated by boats and animals, the natural world providing an alternative to "loneliness, boredom, and fear." His self-confidence was not what it might have been. Elledge remarks:

Though he had good friends among his peers, could write better poems than his classmates, and could state, swim and canoe at least as well as any one of them, he was afraid to speak to girls he liked, forgot his speech in a debate, and failed to make the track team. At parties he felt ill at ease. The first signs of hypochondria seem to have appeared during his adolescence

In 1917, when war broke out, White was typically uncertain of what he wanted. He didn't know whether to enlist or to go to Cornell and wait for the draft. In the event, he chose Cornell, working as a Farm Cadet the summer before he left to satisfy his feelings of patriotism.

According to Elledge, White's college education seemed to strengthen and confirm rather than shape or remold his character. He chose Cornell rather than any other college because his older brothers had studied ther and because "Cornell was less uncomfortably elitist, less discriminatory, less homogenous than Harvard. Yale or Princeton,"--schools he could easily have entered. In the course of his years in college. White became editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun, a post which seems to have meant more to him than any other single experience.

College experience, though inadvertently preparing for his later work as an essayist, seems not to have kindled any great ambition for literature, Elledge remarks that:

To be sure, "the sanctity of the English sentence," is something few students discover, but a good literary education leads to other discoverers, wider in scope, among them the discovery that the works of great writers nourish the imagination and augment the wisdom of experience. Andy took courses under professors capable of giving such a literary education but none seems to have succeeded with him.