E.B. White and some pencil

[From Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater, 2025). Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart, Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White. Click for a larger view.]

There is no reason to think that E.B. White was sitting by himself in Sardi’s on March 31, 1943, the opening night of Oklahoma! Heck, E.B. and Katherine White moved to Brooklin, Maine in 1938. But White’s presence in the replica Sardi’s of Blue Moon affords Lorenz Hart a Somebody with whom to talk.

As the two talk, Hart tells a story of a mouse who keeps showing up in his nineteenth-floor apartment. He decides to call the mouse Stuart, with a u , he says. White listens, and then jots something in his notebook. There is, of course, no evidence that any such conversation was the germ of Stuart Little. White himself gave an account of the novel’s origin.


Yes, the pencil is a Blackwing or, more likely, a replica Blackwing. At least some people who know pencils regard the company that manufactures the replica as engaging in dubious, dishonest advertising and theft of intellectual property. E.B. White, who died long before the replica Blackwing was manufactured and who could never have written with it, is just one of the prominent persons the company has touted as a user of its product.

If you want a great (and far less expensive) wood pencil, there’s Faber-Castell, General, Mitsubishi, Musgrave, Staedtler, and Tombow. If you want a great movie, there’s Blue Moon.

Here’s a well-known photograph of E.B. White in the company of a dachshund and a Mongol pencil.

Related reading
All OCA Blackwing posts : E.B. White posts (Pinboard)