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In 1922, just out of college and at loose ends, E.B. White set off across America in a Model T. He left his map at home, but packed his typewriter— his true destination, he tells us, was the world of letters. White wrote the richly humorous "Farewell to Model T" for The New Yorker in 1936; it was the first of his essays to bring him fame. In "From Sea to Shining Sea," White conjures the unspoiled America that remained his most enduring subject.

The first essay of E. B. White's to become famous, "Farewell to Model T" originally appeared in 1936 in The New Yorker as "Farewell My Lovely." It is rich in comic descriptions of the eccentricities of the car, the demands it put on its devoted owners, and the hardware and decorative accessories—from 98-cent anti-rattlers to the "de-luxe flower vase of the cut-glass anti-splash type"—that kept them pouring over the Sears Roebuck catalog. If there was an owner's manual for the flivver, it didn't begin to divulge what the owner needed to know. That's where theory, speculation, superstition, and metaphysics came in: "I remember once spitting into a timer," White recalls, "not in anger, but in a spirit of research."

It is published for the first time with "Sea to Shining Sea," in which White conjures the America that he had discovered as a 22-year old during a cross country trip in his Model T. (The year was 1922, the same the year that Fitzgerald and Hemingway went to Paris to find themselves.) In it he would write: "My own vision of the land—my own discovery of it—was shaped, more than by any other instrument, by a Model T Ford...a slow-motion roadster of miraculous design—strong, tremulous, and tireless, from sea to shining sea."


“Thoroughly American and utterly beautiful” is how William Shawn, his editor at The New Yorker, described E. B. White’s prose. At the magazine, White developed a pure and plain-spoken literary style; his writing was characterized by wit, sophistication, optimism, and moral steadfastness. In 1978 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the body of his work. E. B. White died in 1985.
Hardcover, 42pp.
5.25” x 7.25”
ISBN 10: 1-892145-21-9
ISBN 13: 9781892145215
Retail price: $12.95
Price: $10.36 (20% off)
“This is one of the 20th century's most easy-to-read writers, holding forth on two subjects close to his heart: the automobile and the road trip….The truth is that I grabbed this volume from a tall stack of review possibilities, read it immediately and savored it like a deep draft from a fresh keg. All of E.B. White's prose is wonderful, and the words on the automobile, aged 50 or 67 years, ring with a special tenderness and sense of play— maybe because the author (born in 1899) was about the same age as the automobile in America. The work never shows in his sentences, and they always seem to leave the right note hanging in the air. The joy he finds in simply advancing from one town to another is a healthy thing to be reminded of.”—Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

To an American, the physical fact of the complete America is, at best, a dream, a belief, a memory, and the sound of names. My own vision of the land—my own discovery of its size and meaning—was shaped, more than by any other instrument, by a Model T Ford. The vision endures; the small black roadster as always there, alive and kicking, a bedroll wedged against its spare, a dictionary sprawling on its floor, an Army trunk bracketed to its left running board. The course of my life was changed by it, and it is in a class by itself. It was cheap enough so I could afford to buy one; it was capable enough so it gave me courage to start.
         Youth, I have no doubt, will always recognize its own frontier and push beyond it by whatever means are at hand. As for me, I’ve always been glad that mine was a two-track road running across the prairie into the sinking sun, and underneath me a slow-motion roadster of miraculous design—strong, tremulous, and tireless, from sea to shining sea.