The Essays of E.B. White

Even fans call the collection uneven: out of more than thirty essays, only a fraction are truly memorable, and readers admit “the majority of his other writing is dry” by comparison. The Cold War-era disarmament pieces, Unity among them, read as dated now, the parts readers skim or skip outright. At least one reader flags real discomfort in passages where White writes about his own wife, reading a habit “to look down at her” as condescending rather than affectionate today. The tone tips too far the other direction elsewhere, warm writing that gets “dangerously close to saccharine,” and a critic's harsher read lands on the same problem from a different angle: readers are “left with nothing but echoes and aftertastes” once the book closes, a vivid mood without much retained afterward.