Word: elwyn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...case, but the path he took ambled through a series of happy circumstances. The sixth child of a well-to-do piano manufacturer, he grew up in Mount Vernon, a tree-lined suburb of New York City. He went to Cornell, where he gladly surrendered his given names, Elwyn Brooks, for the moniker Andy (after Andrew D. White, the university's first president). After graduation, White held jobs in journalism and advertising without finding an employer who could make good use of his whimsical temperament and lapidary prose...
WHITE'S CHILDHOOD seems to have been happy. He was born in 1899, "in the fashionable section of Mounte Vemon. New York," to loving and prosperous parents Elwyn Brooks White was the sixth and youngest child of his family. His father taught him" to respect the responsibilities of the head of a family as well as the rights of all its members to privacy, independence, and self-realization.... But much more important, during his most impressionable years, he learned from his father to be an optimist, and to believe in his luck." From his mother, White seems to have received...
...just this response that Biographer Scott Elledge, an English professor at Cornell, tries to deflect. The life of Author E.B. White, 84, Elledge keeps insisting, has been harder than it looks, from birth onward: "Elwyn was not a weakling or a sickly child, but he was not robust . . . his hay fever was so severe that his father took him (with the rest of the family) to Maine for the month of August in the hope of escaping the pollen that made him miserable." After enduring these hard knocks, this youngest of six children of well-to-do parents went...
...they were not very formidable-males weighed no more than 5½ kg (12 lbs.), females about 80% of that-they could take on a ferocious appearance. Whenever the males competed with one another for females or were threatened, they would bare their fanglike canines. Comments Duke University Paleontologist Elwyn Simons: "A nasty little thing...