Nathan Heller on E. B. White's Paragraph About the Moon Landing

The New Yorker was in its infancy when it discovered Elwyn Brooks White, who made his first contribution in 1925, the year of the magazine's founding.

- Nathan Heller

July 26, 1969

By the following spring, he was writing everything from cartoon captions to editorials, all of which would help establish its manner and voice. The New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, regarded The Talk of the Town as the keystone of each issue, and sent as much of it as possible through White's typewriter.

Yet for all of White's ubiquity-he contributed reporting, essays, humor, fiction, verse, criticism, and even copy for subscription advertisements-he despaired, as he turned thirty, and then forty, of leaving only magazine clippings behind.

White published his first major work, “Stuart Little,” no less significant for being a children’s novel, when he was forty-six. By that time, he had come to be prized at The New Yorker as a “paragrapher,” a writer of short commentary. With perfect paragraphs set one after another like flagstones in the high grass, White knew, you could lead a reader anywhere. Ross knew it, too, and for decades White’s paragraphs, unsigned as Notes and Comment, opened the magazine.