William Zinsser: Be Wary of Security as a Goal

“Ultimately, the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is,” Mr. Zinsser wrote in “On Writing Well.” He added: “I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me — some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.”

In an autobiography, “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past” (2004), Mr. Zinsser said he did not find his writer’s voice until he was in his 50s, when he wrote “On Writing Well.” He had hoped to be perceived as “the urbane essayist or columnist or humorist,” he said, but realized that his most basic desire was to be a helpful instructor, “to pass along what I knew.

“Now, whatever I write about, I make myself available,” he wrote. “No hiding.”

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William Knowlton Zinsser was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1922. He escaped the urgings of his father to join the family’s shellac business but could not escape his mother’s counsel that being cheerful was a Christian obligation.

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“It is because of her that I am cursed with optimism,” he said in his autobiography.
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“I’ve always thought he waived one or two credits to make my total come out right,” Mr. Zinsser said of the dean, Robert K. Root, in his autobiography. “In the middle of the interview he stopped counting; numbers weren’t as important to him as learning.”

In a manner typical of his writing, Mr. Zinsser used this episode to make a philosophical point about America’s obsession with winning and losing. “Don’t be afraid to fail,” he declared.

He described his own life as a chain of disruptions. He lost his beloved first job at The Herald Tribune when the paper closed in 1966. He left New York for New Haven to teach at Yale, something completely new. He left Yale for the Book-of-the-Month Club, another uprooting. He was nervous, he said, but things worked out.

“Be wary of security as a goal,” Mr. Zinsser advised graduates of Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1988. “It may often look like life’s best prize. Usually it’s not.”