Books: Humorist

Quo Vadimus?—E.B. White—Harper ($2).

Elwyn Brooks ("Andy") White for eleven years wrote the oxymoronic introductory paragraphs to each New Yorker issue. The tone of these paragraphs, a kind of precocious, off-hand humming, has been imitated but never exactly reproduced by his successors. In 1937 he resigned from The New Yorker, after writing an inimitable farewell whose gamut ranged from a baritone sigh to a neurasthenic squeak. True to his theme (that the town was getting too much for him) he went off to live in the Maine countryside, at North Brooklin. Thence he contributes...