E. B. White Audiobooks

A New Yorker stylist writing for children, as The Trumpet of the Swan quietly proves

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.7/5 average

2 listener ratings

Who is E. B. White?

E. B. White – Elwyn Brooks White in full – was an American writer and essayist, born in 1899, and a long-serving contributing editor at The New Yorker. He is remembered twice over: by children, for Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952) and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970); and by writers, as co-author of The Elements of Style, the slim usage guide that still sits within reach of working desks everywhere.

His standing is anything but sentimental. Charlotte’s Web was ranked first when School Library Journal readers voted on the top one hundred children’s novels in 2012, and Kurt Vonnegut called him one of the most admirable prose stylists his country had produced. White died in 1985; nothing about the prose has dated.

E. B. White in audiobooks

We carry The Trumpet of the Swan, the last-published of his three children’s classics, and it shows why White in audio is such a quietly luxurious experience: this is writing by a stylist’s stylist, every sentence weighed and balanced, and hearing it read aloud makes the craftsmanship audible in a way silent reading can miss.

It is family listening of the best kind – genuinely for children, genuinely pleasurable for the adults in the front seats. For UK households building a library of classics in audio, White belongs very near the top of the pile.