William Strunk

William Strunk Jr. (1869–1946) was an American scholar and teacher of English. Born in Cincinnati, he took his doctorate at Cornell University in 1896 and taught there for forty-six years, specializing in the literature of the Renaissance and editing plays of Shakespeare and Dryden for students. In 1918 he had printed, for use in his own classes, a forty-three-page pamphlet called The Elements of Style, which his former student E. B. White revised and expanded in 1959 into one of the best-selling books on writing ever published. White's affectionate essay on him is prefaced to later editions.