"Congratulations on your manly attempt to make me into a literary character," E. B. White wrote in a letter to his biographer. "It isn"t going to work, but it makes great reading. I was in stitches much of the way, recalling my Early Ineptitude, my Early Sorrows, my Immaculate Romancing. What a mess I was! No wonder my father worried about me." After the biography was published (in 1984), White offered this insider"s review: "I wish you the joy of the book and am only sorry my life wasn"t crowded with exciting, bawdy, violent events. I know how hard it is to write about a fellow who spends most of his time crouched over a typewriter. That was my fate, too." Letters of E. B. White touches on these and other subjects, including the New Yorker editor who became his wife; their dachshund, Fred, with his "look of fake respectability"; and White"s literary colleagues, from Harold Ross and James Thurber to Groucho Marx and John Updike and, later, Senator Edmund S. Muskie and...