The Elements of Style - History

History

Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr., wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, and privately published it in 1919, for in-house use at the university. Later, for publication, he and editor Edward A. Tenney revised it as The Elements and Practice of Composition (1935). In 1957, at The New Yorker, the style guide reached the attention of E. B. White, who had studied writing under Strunk in 1919, but had since forgotten "the little book" that he described as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English." Weeks later, White wrote a feature story about Strunk's devotion to lucid English prose.

Macmillan and Company publishers subsequently commissioned White to revise the 41-year-old text of The Elements of Style (1918) for a 1959 edition (Strunk had died in 1946). White's expansion and modernization of Strunk's 1935 revised edition yielded the writing style manual informally known as Strunk & White, the first edition of which sold approximately two million copies in 1959. In the ensuing four decades, more than ten million copies of three editions have been sold. The history of this writing manual is told in Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (2009), by Mark Garvey.