Umpteen English classes later, The Elements of Style turns fifty
It was known as "the little book"—a slim volume whose purpose was no less than to give its holder a mighty command of the mother tongue. Written by legendary English professor William Strunk Jr., PhD 1896, The Elements of Style fell into disuse after his retirement in 1937. It got a second life two decades later, when one of his star pupils—E. B. White '21, by then a celebrated essayist and the author of the children's classics Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little—memorialized the book in a New Yorker column. Alongside ads for finned Cadillacs and United's "men only" flights for busy executives, White recalled the value of Strunk's wee opus: "a forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English."
"Omit needless words." It's Strunk's most famous commandment, but there are others: "Use definite, specific, concrete language." "Use the active voice." After White's column ran in July 1957, the Macmillan Company expressed interest in republishing The Elements of Style, if White would provide revisions and an introduction. ("In these latter days," an editor wrote him regarding the book's prospects, "many bright people who are supposed to be teaching English composition have gone whoring after strange gods, and this pursuit seems to have conferred upon them the gift of tongues, though in no two instances the same tongue.") Strunk had died in 1946, but his family agreed.
The first edition of the now-famous version of The Elements of Style—known colloquially as Strunk and White—came out a half-century ago, in 1959. It was priced modestly ($2.50 hardcover, $1 paperback), better to reach the masses. "It was something that people could afford," says University Archivist Elaine Engst, MA '72. "The idea always has been that it was 'the little book.'"
Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in Kroch Library has extensive holdings on The Elements of Style, including White's original manuscript, typed on yellow paper. It has copies of the various editions—there have been three official revisions, plus an illustrated version and a fiftieth anniversary volume in black hardcover—not to mention foreign incarnations, like the one designed to help native Japanese speakers write in Strunk's English. Kroch also has extensive correspondence between White and his readers, some of whom reminisce about the harshness of their mutual taskmaster. "He could almost weep over something tenderhearted," physician Rose Donk 1905 recalled of Strunk. "However, he was anything but gentle when that single-page theme was a flop."
The Elements of Style was a bestseller, which Engst chalks up to its accessibility and White's fame; plus, she says, "it made English teachers' lives easier." As one bookstore clerk wrote to White: "It's propped up on the front table with all the other 'hot' paperbacks—between the Rand McNally Road Atlas and The Joy of Sex. And it's selling faster than either one of them."