Katharine S. White (1892–1977) was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, the youngest of three daughters. She attended Miss Winsor’s School and Bryn Mawr College, and in 1915 married Ernest Angell, with whom she had two children, Nancy and Roger. She became the first fiction editor at The New Yorker in 1925. Four years later, she met and, after separating from her first husband, married E.B. White, with whom she had one son, Joel. In the early 1930s the Whites bought a farmhouse in North Brooklin, Maine, and by the end of the decade they moved there from New York. White began writing garden pieces for The New Yorker in 1958, in the waning years of her long career as fiction editor, in which she exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century American literature. Onward and Upward in the Garden (1979) is her only book, edited and published posthumously by her husband E.B. White.

E.B. White (1899–1985) was the youngest of six children, born in Mount Vernon, New York. He attended Cornell University, where he earned his lifelong nickname, Andy. He worked as a reporter and a copywriter before being recommended for a job at the newly founded New Yorker by the fiction editor Katharine Angell, who had read his submissions to the magazine. White became a regular contributor to The New Yorker in 1927, writing essays known for their humor and honesty. He was the author of three beloved children’s books, Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970), and the co-author of Elements of Style (1959) with his former professor William Strunk Jr. In 1971 he received the National Medal for Literature. His masterful Here Is New York, considered one of the ten best books ever written about New York City, is available from The Little Bookroom.