Joel White

Joel McCoun White (December 21, 1930 – December 5, 1997) was an American naval architect.

Early life and education Born in Manhattan, White was the only child of the writer E. B. White and his wife Katharine Sergeant Angell White, fiction editor of The New Yorker. He was the son with whom E. B. White revisited the lake where he had gone on boyhood vacations, as chronicled in his 1941 essay "Once More to the Lake"; the essayist Roger Angell was his half-brother. He grew up in North Brooklin, Maine and attended Cornell University, then transferred after two years to MIT, from where he graduated in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in naval architecture.

Career White worked as a boat builder in Newport News, Virginia, served in the Army, then in 1960, in a former herring-packing plant, He contributed designs to WoodenBoat magazine and in 1988 published Wood, Water & Light: Classic Wooden Boats, with photographs by Benjamin Mendlowitz; The Brooklin Boat Yard continues under employee ownership as of 2026.

Personal life and death White and his wife, Allene, had two sons and a daughter. He died of lung cancer in 1997 at home in Brooklin, Maine.