White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the youngest child of Samuel Tilly White, the president of a piano firm, and Jessie Hart White, the daughter of Scottish-American painter William Hart.[3] He served in the army before going to college. White graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1921. He picked up the nickname "Andy" at Cornell University, where tradition confers that moniker on any male student surnamed 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[4] and Quill and Dagger societies and Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI).

White worked for the United Press (currently the United Press International) and the American Legion News Service in 1921 and 1922, and then became a reporter for The Seattle Times in 1922 and 1923. He then worked for two years with the Frank Seaman advertising agency as a production assistant and copywriter[5] before returning to New York City in 1924. Not long after The New Yorker was founded in 1925, White submitted manuscripts to it. Katharine Angell, the literary editor, recommended to magazine editor and founder Harold Ross that White be taken on as staff. However, it took months to convince him to come to a meeting at the office and further weeks to convince him to agree to work on the premises. Eventually he agreed to work