E.B. Whiter than White
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Lorenz Hart
12 min read
The article opens with discussion of the film Blue Moon about Rodgers and Hart's breakup, praising Hart as a 'lyrical genius' alongside Porter, Gershwin, and Berlin. Readers would benefit from learning about Hart's troubled life, his partnership with Richard Rodgers, and his remarkable body of work that produced so many American standards.
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The Elements of Style
11 min read
The article references White as 'the White of Strunk & White, beloved by a certain sort of American writer as the supposed last word on the rules of writing.' Understanding the history and influence of this iconic writing manual—and the debates surrounding its prescriptions—adds essential context to the author's critique of White's prose style.
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New Journalism
12 min read
The author contrasts White unfavorably with Joseph Mitchell, David Halberstam, and Gay Talese—key figures in the New Journalism movement. Understanding this literary movement helps readers grasp the stylistic tension the essay explores between White's genteel personal essay tradition and the more immersive, experimental approach these other writers pioneered.
I had been hoping to see a great movie on the big screen, but ended up going to see Blue Moon, the new film about the break-up of Rodgers and Hart. I went more out of a sense of Lorenz Hart’s genius being worth the ticket, than in any hope that it would be, in itself, a great film. And so it went. Blue Moon was decent enough, but it is written like a play, not a movie. Sometimes it is laugh out loud funny. It ended about five minutes after I got sick of it.
Lorenz Hart was a lyrical genius. You can skip the film, but be sure to put his songs on. Along with Porter, Gershwin, and Berlin, Hart is one of the great lyricists of the Great American Song Book. Manhattan, Bewitched, Isn’t it Romantic, This Can’t Be Love, My Funny Valentine, The Lady is a Tramp, I Could Write a Book, Thou Swell, Where or When, and, of course, Blue Moon are some of his songs that became standards.
One mystery of the film was the presence of E.B. White. I don’t know why E.B. White is in Blue Moon, and I doubt that the screenwriter does either. Hart’s character needed a foil, having worn out two others, and White provided the dour counterpoint necessary to keep the scene in balance. Time magazine reports that this was more or less the explicit reason for including White: “so Hart would have someone with whom to discuss the art of writing.”
It is little wonder they chose White to be Hart’s interlocutor. No figure could have more immediate cachet with a film-watching audience for a “conversation about writing” in the mid twentieth-century. White has frequently been held up as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century. James Thurber said that “No one can write a sentence like E. B. White.” That still seems to be the consensus.
Kurt Vonnegut called him one of the best stylists America has ever produced, and praised the “charming” things he has to say. In Lithub this year Sam Weller called him not only a “beloved children’s author” but an “innovative and revered essayist”. Last year James T. Keane said White should be better known for his essays than his children’s books. White is a staple of anthologies and writing classes thanks to these ...
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