White was shy around women, claiming he had "too small a heart, too large a pen." But in 1929, culminating in an affair which led to her divorce, White and Katherine Angell were married. They had a son, Joel White, a naval architect and boat builder, who later owned Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin, Maine. Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, has spent decades as a fiction editor for "The New Yorker" and is well known as the magazine's baseball writer.