When E.B. White received the Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the following citation, here quoted in part, accompanied the award:

"If we are remembered as a civilized era, I think it will be partly because of E.B. White. The historians of the future will decide that a writer of such grace and control could not have been produced by a generation wholly lacking in such qualities, and we will shine by reflection in his gentle light.

"Of all the gifts he has given us in his apparently casual essays, the best gift is himself. He has permitted us to meet a man who is both cheerful and wises, the owner of an uncommon sense that is lit by laughter. When he writes of large subjects he does not make them larger and windier than they are, and when he writes of small things they are never insignificant. He is, in fact, a civilized human being - an order of man that has always been distinguished for its rarity."

The essays in this companion volume to the Letters to E.B. White have been selected by White himself, from a lifetime of writing. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading." he writes in the Foreword, "along with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." The Essays of E.B. White are incomparable, like his Letters, this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.