We should do more to honor E.B. White’s legacy

By Steele Hays

It’s been 40 years since E.B. White died at home in his North Brooklin farmhouse overlooking Blue Hill Bay in October 1985. So this month is an appropriate time to reflect on his legacy, to reread and enjoy some of his work, and to celebrate his talent. 

We’re fortunate to live in an area where many outstanding writers currently live and work, just as many others have done in the past. None of them has had as much impact on American culture and literature as E.B. “Andy” White. It’s not even close.

His two children’s books, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little” are classics. And that’s an understatement. Charlotte’s Web is still in print, has sold more than 45 million copies since its first press run in 1952, and has been translated into 23 languages. His collected essays and letters continue to inspire and entertain readers. 

E.B. White has also been on my mind because I’ve just finished reading a biography of White’s wife and literary partner, Katharine Sergeant White, who was an essential part of E.B.’s success and also a hugely influential editor at The New Yorker magazine during its formative years. Her own book, “Onward & Upward in the Garden” is also considered a classic, beloved by many people. 

With that background, here is a critical observation: The people and institutions of the Blue Hill area haven’t done enough to honor and celebrate E.B. and Katharine White and their impact on American literature and culture. We really haven’t. There is no museum or library dedicated to the Whites. Their farmhouse is privately owned and not open to the public. There are a few references to the Whites in the Friends Library in Brooklin, and at the Brooklin Keeping Society (open one afternoon a week) and you can visit the graves of the Whites in the Brooklin Cemetery, which are shaded by a large oak tree E.B. planted there when Katharine predeceased him in 1977. There’s a Charlotte’s Web display each year at the Blue Hill Fair.

We should do more. 

Another observation: White was not just a wonderful children’s book author and a world-class essayist. It is not well remembered today, but he also wrote powerfully and presciently about world affairs at a particularly fraught time–during the 1930’s rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe, and then during World War II. White’s granddaughter, Martha White, recently published a collection of his essays on world affairs entitled “E.B. White on Democracy.” One of those essays is entitled “Freedom” and it’s worth quoting for its relevance to what’s happening today in the United States:

“But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause.”

We’ve had a plethora of “good causes” needing charitable donations here on the Blue Hill Peninsula in the last two years: the hospital, capital campaigns for George Stevens Academy and Brooklin Friends Library as well as the East Blue Hill Library, and the effort to save the Salt Pond Blueberry Barrens. It’s not an ideal time to launch another fundraising effort, but it would be worth hearing from as many people and perspectives as possible whether there’s any merit in the idea of creating something to honor and celebrate E.B. and Katharine White’s achievements and literary greatness. There would be no better place to do it than right here.  

And that brings one of E.B. White’s sayings to mind about how special it is to live in Maine: “I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else.”

–Hays is a freelance writer for The Rising Tide, along with other publications.