Walden: Or, Life In The Woods By Henry David Thoreau
E. B. White’s most important literary influence was Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden: Or, Life in the Woods(1854), the only book White really cared about owning. White believed that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” that most people spend their lives getting ready to live but never actually living. White’s short stories usually deal with the quiet desperation of life in the big city, where human beings trapped in an unnatural environment are beset by stress and anxiety. Whereas Thoreau wrote about the joy of living close to nature, White, as a New Yorker contributor. He had to deal with the reverse side of the picture, and he had to deal with the anomie of life in one of America’s most crowded, most competitive