In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte's Web was ranked first in their poll of the top one hundred children's novels.

[4] Elwyn's older brother Stanley Hart White, known as Stan, a professor of landscape architecture and the inventor of the vertical garden, taught E.B.

Following the end of World War I, the SATC program was disbanded in December 1918, and White did not serve with the active armed forces.

[10] He worked as editor of The Cornell Daily Sun with classmate Allison Danzig, who later became a sportswriter for The New York Times.

As a Cornell University student, White was a member of Aleph Samach,[11] Quill and Dagger,[12][13] and Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.

[17] He then worked for almost two years with the Frank Seaman advertising agency as a production assistant and copywriter[18] before returning to New York City in 1924.

Katharine Angell, the literary editor, recommended to editor-in-chief and founder Harold Ross that White be hired as a staff writer.

From the beginning to the end of his career at The New Yorker, he frequently provided what the magazine calls "Newsbreaks", which were short, witty comments on oddly worded printed items from many sources, under various categories, such as "Block That Metaphor."

This handbook of grammatical and stylistic guidance for writers of American English was first written and published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., one of White's professors at Cornell.

That same year, Nico Muhly, a New York City composer, premiered a short opera based on the book.

In 1978, White was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, citing "his letters, essays and the full body of his work".

[21] He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and honorary memberships in a variety of literary societies throughout the United States.

Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, spent decades as a fiction editor for The New Yorker and was well known as the magazine's baseball writer.

[citation needed] James Thurber described White as a quiet man who disliked publicity and who, during his time at The New Yorker, would slip out of his office via the fire escape to a nearby branch of Schrafft's to avoid visitors he didn't know: Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape.

He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.Later in life, White developed Alzheimer's disease.

White Read Aloud Award is given by The Association of Booksellers for Children (ABC) to honor books that its membership feel embodies the universal read-aloud standards that E.B.