William Strunk Jr.

William Strunk Jr. (July 1, 1869 – September 26, 1946) was an American professor of English at Cornell University and the author of The Elements of Style (1918). After his former student E. B. White revised and extended the book, The Elements of Style became an influential guide to writing in the English language, informally known as "Strunk & White".

Life and career

William Strunk was born and reared in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of the four surviving children of William and Ella Garretson Strunk. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1890 and a PhD at Cornell University in 1896. He spent the academic year 1898–99 at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, where he studied morphology and philology.

Strunk first taught mathematics at Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1890–91. He then taught English at Cornell for 46 years, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, disdaining specialization and becoming an expert in both classical and non-English literature. In 1922 he published English Metres, a study of poetic metrical form, and he compiled critical editions of Cynewulf's Juliana, several works of Dryden, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and several Shakespearean plays. Strunk was also active in a gathering known as the Manuscript Club, an "informal Saturday-night gathering of students and professors interested in writing," where he met "a sensitive and deeply thoughtful young man named Elwyn Brooks White."

In 1935–36, Strunk enjoyed serving as the literary consultant for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film Romeo and Juliet (1936). In the studio he was known as "the professor," in part because, with his three-piece suit and wire-rim spectacles, he "looked as though he'd been delivered to the set from MGM's casting department."