Thomas Willis White was born in Williamsburg, Va. , of English ancestry. His father, Thomas White, was born at York (later Yorktown), Va. A tailor by trade, he married Sarah Davis, the sister of James Davis to whom he was apprenticed. The parents removed to Norfolk for a short time about 1790, and in 1791 to Richmond, where the father had a prosperous tailoring trade until his death from yellow fever in 1796. The widow, left with four children, soon married again.
At eleven, Thomas was apprenticed to William A. Rind and John Stuart, printers of the Virginia Federalist, and in 1800 removed with them to Washington.
Returning to Richmond in 1807, for a short time he managed the mechanical department of the paper owned by his uncle, Augustine Davis, and later that of Samuel Pleasants. Before he had arrived at his twentieth birthday he secured a position as compositor in the office of the Norfolk Gazette and Publick Ledger. Leaving Norfolk in November 1810, he worked at his trade in Philadelphia for two and a half years and in Boston for four. In April 1817 he returned to Richmond, to live there the remainder of his life. He established a successful printing business, and on July 21, 1827, entered into contract to reprint the Journal of both houses of the Virginia Assembly from 1777 to 1790 and of the convention of 1778. He stimulated authorship by printing several books by local writers: Edge-hill, or the Family of the Fitzroyals by James Ewell Heath and the same author's Whigs and Democrats (1839), a comedy in three acts; The Potomac Muse, by a Lady, a Native of Virginia (1825); The Vocal Standard, or Star Spangled Banner (1824); and The Pocket Farrier (1828) by James Ware. One of his most ambitious publications was an edition in two volumes of Eaton Stannard Barrett's burlesque novel, The Heroine, from which White's imprint was omitted in order that the book might be praised more successfully in the Messenger (December 1836). The first issue of the Southern Literary Messenger came from the press in August 1834 under White's own direction. For the earlier issues he trusted the editorial work to James E. Heath and Conway Robinson Heath wrote the reviews and the articles signed H. , and Robinson the articles signed C. - and in November 1834 began a correspondence with Judge Nathaniel Beverley Tucker of the College of William and Mary, whose advice thereafter influenced him greatly, as did also that of Lucian Minor. Yet he felt that he had the final editorial decision, and wrote proudly to Tucker that he had secured nearly a thousand subscribers. In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe began to contribute to the Messenger. He moved to Richmond in the late summer and by the end of the year had assumed the editorship. White was not altogether satisfied with this. It fretted him considerably when Poe "hampered" him in admitting articles to his Messenger's pages, and more when he felt that he was making a host of enemies for the magazine. By the beginning of 1837, though, the number of subscribers had more than quadrupled, if we may believe Poe's statement, and the Messenger had certainly become known throughout the United States, White was still about eighteen hundred dollars in debt for the magazine and had become "as sick of Poe's writings as of himself. " Poe's work on the Messenger ceased with the January issue of 1837. Congratulating himself on regaining the friendships that he thought the magazine had lost through Poe, White trusted once more to unpaid editorial advice, and sent packages of manuscripts to Tucker and to Minor to be marked for acceptance or rejection. His health, which had been bad as early as 1835, continued to decline until in September 1842 he suffered a stroke of paralysis at the supper-table of the Astor House in New York. He died on January 19, 1843, and was buried from the First Presbyterian Church the next day.
"Little Tom, " as Poe once called him in a letter to a friend, was a short stockily-built man of "indomitable energy and perseverance of character. " He was somewhat testy at times and given to periods of melancholy, but on the whole was of an open and generous nature. He had only the education that he had picked up in a printer's shop, but he had a shrewd knowledge of the world, wrote a good letter, and was able to hold the respect and confidence of many of the leading men of Virginia.
He was married on December 12, 1809, to a Margaret Ann in Gates County, N. C.
