E.B. White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the sixth and youngest child of Samuel Tilly White, the president of a piano firm, and Jessie Hart White, the daughter of Scottish-American painter William Hart. Elwyn's older brother Stanley Hart White, known as Stan, a professor of landscape architecture and the inventor of the Vertical Garden, taught E. B. White to read and to explore the natural world. White graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1921. He got the nickname "Andy" at Cornell, where tradition confers that moniker on any male student whose surname is White, after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White. While at Cornell, he worked as editor of "The Cornell Daily Sun" with classmate Allison Danzig, who later became a sportswriter for "The New York Times". White was also a member of the Aleph Samach and Quill and Dagger societies and Phi Gamma Delta ("Fiji") fraternity.