SOURCE: "A Small Masterpiece," in GQ, Vol. 60, No. 12, December, 1990, pp. 72, 76.

In the following essay, Rohrer praises White's revisions to Strunk's The Elements of Style.

It was an instance of fate that, in 1919, young E. B. White found himself in William Strunk Jr.'s English 8 class at Cornell. Strunk was then teaching grammar from a forty-three-page rule book he'd written and privately published and that he called The Elements of Style. But it wasn't Strunk's homegrown style manual that made a lasting impression on White (White, in fact, quickly forgot the book), it was the man.

"From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor," White says in the introduction he wrote to Strunk's book in 1971, "his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into...