Long before praising a pig, E. B. White wrote a sonnet to a racehorse.

Some nag! Before earning fame as a porcine rescuer, Andy White made a few bob lauding a Derby winner. (Photo by Whitney Combs on Unsplash)

E. B. “Andy” White (1899-1985) was a renowned writer for The New Yorker magazine from the 1920s and into the 1980s. We know him as the author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Elements of Style. Andy graduated at the top of his class at Cornell in journalism, but could not land a job in New York in his field. So he bided his time tapping out poems, short stories, and letters on his Corona typewriter. Andy kept working, hoping that he could launch a career as a writer.

He finally found a job doing publicity work for the American Legion News Service in 1921 but hated the job. Never one to keep set hours, White felt that the situation did not give him time to develop as a writer with his own voice. He gave up PR when he realized that the best writers despised public relations workers. Professional writers thought of Publicity as an overpaid occupation. White saw that a career in PR caused one to lose his soul when the company forced him to spout the party line.

Early in 1922, White drew $400 out of savings and bought a Ford Model T roadster. He persuaded his friend, Cornell dropout Howard Cushman, to quit his dreary job in the city. White proposed the two make a road trip west--across the United States. Unable to afford travel, they decided to take their precious Corona typewriters instead. They would write stories and travelogues for their daily bread. If that failed, any odd job would do to secure the next sack of groceries and tank of gas.

I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a racehorse and got away with it. - E. B. White

There was another difficulty that might not occur to us. The network of highways that we associate with modern American culture did not yet exist. There were no paved roads between Minneapolis and Spokane--a distance of 1400 miles. Seattle was the goal. They drove across the North Dakota prairie in wheel ruts some called a highway. The Ford ambled along, surrounded by tall grasses that obscured the driver’s side view. The most “developed” states had concrete roads that were more like one-lane sidewalks. When two automobiles encountered one another head-on, one had to yield. To allow the other car to pass meant pulling over to a dirt track that ran parallel to the paved road.

That they ever drove the prairie parkway is remarkable. The travelers ran out of funds regularly long before they made it to Minneapolis.

White and Cushman drove into Lexington, Kentucky, to fulfill a youthful longing. They thought one had not lived until one had bet on a horse race. They each had $2 to wager. Cushman’s safe strategy was to bet on the favorite. White was more intuitive and chose his horse based on his fondness for its name: Auntie Mae. A 12-1 underdog, the laconic and bedraggled Auntie Mae looked utterly out of place in the field. Andy’s long-shot somehow prevailed, while Howard’s didn’t even place. White won the enormous sum of $24.

White learned about the dangers of overweening beginner’s luck the hard way. He and Cushman decided to drive to Louisville and take in the 1922 Kentucky Derby. This time each invested six dollars using White’s fail-safe system. At the end of the day, White had sixty cents left, and Cushman lost the entire wad. What to do? Pull out the trusty Corona. White composed a sonnet in praise of Morvich, the winning horse that had broken their hearts. He drove straight to the office of the Louisville Herald and sold the sonnet to the editor for five dollars. The next morning Andy’s poem appeared on the front page. They had recouped their losses.

White sounded a triumphant note in a letter to his girlfriend, Alice. He wrote, “I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a racehorse and got away with it.”