White's own attitude may be glimpsed in an editorial he wrote on a Cornell dean's defense of education. The dean had completely rejected an utilitarian understanding of education. White wrote, "It takes a genius to ignore the material side of education and still leave his mark. And universities aim to develop men and not geniuses. "It is characteristic of White that he wished to be thought of as a man and not as a genius.

FAILING TO BE OVERWHELMED by his education, White also missed the experience of a passionate romance. Though he paid attentions to a girl named Alice Burchfield, their relationship was troubled by poor timing and repeated misapprehensions. Shortly after graduation, while White was in a period of moving from job to job and of travelling across America, he proposed marriage to Alice; she turned him down. For a while they corresponded, as White worked his way across the country. As White was returning to the East Coast:

Alice, not aware of his impending arrival, had mailed him a long letter. When they met in Buffalo, Alice did not tell him what she had said in that letter. The reunion was uncomfortable.... What Alice had wanted Andy to know and had implied in her letter, but could not bring herself to tell him face to face, was that if he were to propose to her now, she might say yes.... By this time, however, Andy had decided that he was no longer in love with her.

Elledge's picture of the White who went to New York City in search of work shows a young man who, though recognizably American, lacked the early experience of maturity and the personal flamboyancy so often equated with life after World War One.

White supported himself in New York through work at several jobs, chiefly in advertising. He contributed light poems to the literary magazines of the day, and a few humorous items to The New Yorker, a new magazine being formed by Harold Ross. On the suggestion of Katharine Angell, one of Ross's assistants. White was hired as a more or less regular staff member: only after several months did he give up his advertising job to work full time for the magazine. White began by writing short items and graduated to writing the "Talk of the Town" section. Though troubled health and personal restlessness sometimes took White away from New York City and from the magazine, he had found what he later recognized as his life's work.

He also found the woman, Katharine Angell, who was to be his wife. Katharine was a beautiful woman, striking for her looks, dress, manner, and not least for intelligence: she gave crucial guidance to the fiction department, helping to develop the distinctive features of the magazine's short stories. Though she was married when she first met White, Katharine obtained a divorce both to spare her children troubled scenes and to marry the man she loved. Though neither of them enjoyed good health, their marriage was in other ways happy. After her death White wrote, "I don't know what I ever did to deserve a wife with Katharine's qualities, but I have always had a lot of luck, and she was the most notable example."

WHITE'S MATURE WORK, in essays or in fiction, dealt very much with the real world; White championed environmental concerns long before they were socially acceptable. He refuted Anne Morrow Lindbergh's The Wave of the Future, which he thought disguised the real evil of fascism. He opposed hydrogen-bomb testing and McCarthyism; he was capable of finding, in the deceits of American advertising, "a family resemblance" to the propagandas of the German Nazis. And in Charlotte's Web White offered:

a modern book based on the integrity of a humble and skeptical view of the natural world and of the human beings in it. It gives no support to prejudice in favor of the superiority of human beings or of one sex over another. It does celebrate a child's generous view of the world and a child's love of that world.

Most of White's problems seem to have resulted not so much from any refusal to face life but from the refusal of American critics to accept the personal diversity of writers. American society, though by no means always moral, is overwhelmingly moralistic; at different times, under certain conditions, some Americans will do anything to establish their favorite slogans. Writers who do not proclaim or support values are dismissed as godless or decadent--annoying labels, however, writers who do take strong moral stands often feel that they have been tricked into doing so, that they will now be dismissed either for impractical idealism or for boring preachiness. White's sensitive health and unaggressive integrity, taken with the fact that he wrote in the highly personal form of the essay, made him vulnerable to shrill attacks long before vulnerability was the fashion.

White did not take all of this lying down. He objected strongly to those writers who sought to control opinion. Working on a World War Two government pamphlet with Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Lerner, and Malcolm Cowley, White wrote:

It is always sobering to encounter the intellectual idealists at work, for they seem to live in a realm of their own, making their plans for the world in much the same way that any common tyrant does. The conversation today reminded me a little of the early New Deal period when Wallace was talking about one God and one king--and it all seems so far removed from the people, who are all full of tiny faults and virtues and whose name is Schmalz and Henderson.

Yet White was not entirely unsympathetic to intellectual radicalism. When Roosevelt was trying to pack the Supreme Court (an attempt White opposed), White observed that:

Fascists, Communists, New Dealists all seem to me persons who have been so tortured by the horrors of the world today that they have simply been unable to live amidst so much that is unsolved, and so cling to the first logic that appeals to them.

But even while he tried to understand the behavior of such intellectuals. White rejected them as role models. On a more emphatic day he wrote that:

This is one of the greatest menaces there is, people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grimly gray and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It's a form of egotism, a supreme form.... How can these bastards hope to get hold of what's the matter with the world when they haven't the slightest idea that something just as bad and unnatural has happened to them?

At times, White's struggle over what American literature and values should be like took comic forms. After Stuart Little had appeared, the reactions at The New Yorker were mixed. Harold Ross shouted at White for saying that the mouse was born, not adopted. White had committed the mortal sin of using the wrong word. Then, reports White:

My next encounter--was with Edmund Wilson, who stopped me in the hall "Hello, hello," he said in his wonderfully high and thrilling voice that sounds like a coaching horn. "I read that book of yours ITI found the first page quite amusing, about the mouse, you know. But I was disappointed that you didn't develop the theme more in the manner of Katka."

Elledge's sympathetic and engaging story tells the life of a man who developed and did not sacrifice his humanism, decency, and commitment to freedom. White's character and achievement must be weighed against the sickness to which his sensitivity exposed him and against the shrillness of those who could accept him only by condescending to him as a humorist. What American letters might have lost in a novelist it gained in an essayist; and what culture might have missed in a hero it found in a sensible, if limited, man.