![]() We're enjoying room service and would like to see you. Stop in here for a drink some fine afternoon. Luckily, he bears no resemblance either physically or temperamentally to me. Since he was the only fictional figure ever to honor and disturb my sleep, I was deeply touched and felt I was not free to change him into a grasshopper or a wallaby. At the risk of seeming a very whimsical fellow indeed, I'll have to break down and confess to you that Stuart Little appeared to me in a dream - all complete with his hat, his cane and his brisk manner. ![]() It does not mean that I'm either challenging or denying Mr. ANGELL: You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character of the story has somewhat the attributes on appearance of a mouse. SIMON: First of March 1939, he writes to Eugene Saxton, where he encloses the unfinished manuscript of a book called "Stuart Little." SIMON: If I could ask you to turn to page 182 in the book. He was a very modest writer, a very exciting writer, and expected a lot of himself, not for ambitious writing, but he wanted to get things right. When he mails off "Charlotte's Web" he's full of doubt about that. There's a tone of involvement in all these letters, involvement with himself, with what is going on in his mind. ANGELL: I think he was always working things out. SIMON: Did he use letters to work things out in his mind? ![]() It was always a long, hard slog through the day and to meet a deadline, and I could just see how hard it was. I heard him talk about that all the time. I never heard him talk - I heard him talk about how hard writing was. ANGELL: No, and he was not writerly in that sense. Did he ever talk to you about what made him want to become a writer? SIMON: Married to Katherine Angell White, your mother. ROGER ANGELL (Senior Editor, The New Yorker): Nice to be with you. Angell, thanks so much for being with us. White's stepson, Roger Angell, senior editor at The New Yorker, for which E.B. Now, John Updike has done the introduction to this collection of E.B. This new edition of his letters begins almost a century ago, in 1908 when at eight years of age he writes his older brother Albert, I'm sure it is a long time since your post came, but I have been waiting for something to say to one of the last, in 1984, when he tells a friend who's just 85, Stay on your feet, it's the place to be. He wrote for perhaps the most sophisticated popular magazine in America and he charmed young readers of all ages in books that included "Charlotte's Web" and "Stuart Little." His style was often called compressed and plain, yet few writers ever had a style that was more extravagantly admired. Yet no writer has ever been more eloquent about New York City. He loved writing about his life on a farm in Maine. White was the writer who took the personal essay to new heights of elegance, wit and pith. Well, it would be a shame to miss this one.Ī new revised edition of E.B. White, and I know that people would rather buy a book about a writer everybody hates the guts of. White once cautioned a biographer not to refer to him as beloved. I'm Scott Simon.Ĭoming up, a new generation's interest in Edith Piaf, France's "Little Sparrow." But first, the writer E.B.
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