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[Note: This material is copyright by The Courier-Journal, and is reproduced here as a matter of "fair use" for non-commercial, educational purposes only. Any other use may require the prior approval of The Courier-Journal.]

And so it is, and will forever be.

There is no better American essayist than E.B. White. Period. Some writers can write well but not think clearly. Some writers can think clearly but not write well. Some can do neither. White did both. His essays, his letters, his quips and his squibs are simply beautiful, and his novel Charlotte's Web is one of the great American books.

Over the years, his essays, his poems, his sketches and his letters have been compiled into a small shelf of books -- a small shelf of literary splendor. Now, an expanded version of Letters of E.B. White has been published, 30 years after the first edition, with some new letters and a new foreword by John Updike. White's letters are better than Updike's foreword.

White was a prodigious letter writer from the time he went to college until he became a sick old man, even though he told his brother that "I avoid writing letters -- it resembles too closely writing itself, and gives me a headache." Indeed, he often said -- eloquently, of course -- that writing was not easy for him. "We are having splendid weather [in Maine], and I am building a stone wall," White wrote to his editor at The New Yorker in the 1930s. "I understand that all literary people, at one time or another, build a stone wall. It's because it is easier than writing."

In the 1940s, he wrote -- again from Maine -- "I have discovered, rather too late in life, that there is nothing so much fun as building a boat. The best thing about boat building is that it allows absolutely no time for writing. . . ." And: "I am not as sure of myself as I used to be, and write rather timidly, staring at each word as it comes out, and wondering what is wrong with it."

In the 1950s, he wrote to a priest: "At my age, I am haunted by the feeling that everything I write I've written before, only better."

And in the 1980s: "In my own experience I have found that I'm more likely to write when I feel terrible than when I feel great. If you feel good, you don't have to write -- you go somewhere and do something pleasant." But also, "There's no such thing as retiring from writing, you just run out of gas."

Maybe it was hard, but it looks effortless. He mentions an aged friend's "comical little letters that are on the border between senility and agility." He writes his brother that one of the dogs is in heat, and the other, an old dachshund named Fred, "is trying to adjust the demands of passion to the limitations of arthritis."

And in the 1950s, when all the world was worried about nuclear threats, he declined requests to reprint "The Morning of the Day They Did it." "Got my reasons," he said in a letter. "One reason is that I am not sure it's a public service to describe the end of the world, even in a spirit of satire. People are jumpy, right now, and I see no reason to explode paper bags."

Wonderful phrases tumbled out of his mind and his typewriter. A 1957 letter: "I'm sorry to be so late in acknowledging your gift -- am right in the middle of dispersing the contents of our city apartment, preparatory to moving to Maine, and I am covered with dust and distraction."

And defending his use of the colloquial "yellow jaundice" to a doctor who said the phrase was redundant: "Thank you for your watchfulness. You say you have an advantage, in that you are a doctor. But I have an advantage, too, in that I am not."

White's essays -- collected in another book -- better show the breadth and depth of the man than do the letters, but the letters better show his humanness and humanity. The essays show him to have an eloquent and lifelong devotion for freedoms, the letters an eloquent and lifelong devotion to friends.

The last paragraph of Charlotte's Web talks about Wilbur the pig's devotion to Charlotte, the spider who saved his life by spinning words in her web. "Wilbur never forgot Charlotte," White wrote. "Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

And so was E. B. White.
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Michael Gartner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has been, among other things, editor of The Des Moines Register and The Courier-Journal. He lives in Des Moines and owns the Iowa Cubs baseball team.