The Story of Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic

By Michael Sims

While composing what would become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White obeyed that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats-White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours as a child and adult. Painfully shy, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It's all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship with E. B. White.

Michael Sims chronicles White's animal-rich childhood, his writing about urban nature for the New Yorker, his scientific research into how spiders spin webs and lay eggs, his friendship with his legendary editor, Ursula Nordstrom, the composition and publication of his masterpiece, and his ongoing quest to recapture an enchanted childhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Release date: Jun 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780802778178

Michael Sims

Michael Sims's six acclaimed non-fiction books include The Adventures of Henry Thoreau, The Story of Charlotte's Web, and Adam's Navel, and he edits the Connoisseur's Collection anthology series, which includes Dracula's Guest, The Dead Witness, The Phantom Coach, and the forthcoming Frankenstein Dreams. His writing has appeared in New Statesman, New York Times, Washington Post, and many other periodicals. He appears often on NPR, BBC, and other networks. He lives in Pennsylvania. michaelsimsbooks.com

Book preview

The Story of

Charlotte’s Web

E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the

Birth of an American Classic

Michael Sims

To the amazing Dr. Patterson

But real life is only one kind of life—

there is also the life of the imagination.

CONTENTS

Source Note

Introduction: Translating Yourself

PART I:ELWYN

Chapter 1: Enchanted

Chapter 2: Fear

Chapter 3: Trustworthy

Chapter 4: A Writing Fool

Chapter 5: Liebesträum

PART II:ANDY

Chapter 6: Olympus

Chapter 7: Interview with a Sparrow

Chapter 8: Crazy

Chapter 9: As Spiders Do

PART III:CHARLOTTE

Chapter 10: Dream Farm

Chapter 11: The Mouse of Thought

Chapter 12: Foreknowledge

Chapter 13: Zuckerman’s Barn

Chapter 14: Spinningwork

Chapter 15: Paean

Chapter 16: Some Book

Chapter 17: Completion

Coda: After Charlotte

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations for Frequent Sources

Notes

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Every unattributed quotation that appears before a chapter or between chapter sections is a comment by E. B. White on his own life. Because of house style at The New Yorker, where the first person plural resulted in such royal phrasing as we saw it ourself, and because of White’s habit of reminiscing about his childhood in third person (I knew a boy), these remarks appear in a number of voices, but they are all E. B. White’s.

Introduction

Translating yourself

My wife and I were in Maine, standing in the barn that had belonged to E. B. White and chatting with the current owners, when I backed up to get a better view for a photograph and hit my head on something. Turning around, I saw a heavy old rope dangling in front of me, and I glanced up to where it was looped through a ring attached to a beam over the barn doors. Then I realized what I was staring at.

I turned to the South Carolina couple who had bought the White farm after his death in 1985. Is this—

Mary and Robert Gallant smiled and nodded. Fern and Avery’s rope? Yes.

So it was real too.

I was in the barn that had inspired Charlotte’s Web because, a few years earlier, I had been reading E. B. White’s collected letters when I ran across his reply to a letter from schoolchildren: I didn’t like spiders at first, but then I began watching one of them, and soon saw what a wonderful creature she was and what a skillful weaver. I named her Charlotte.

Wait a minute, I said aloud to the empty room. There was a real Charlotte?

This question was my first step toward discovering the story behind Charlotte’s Web. Was there a real Charlotte, I wanted to know, or was White merely performing in this letter? As I traced the inspirations, discoveries, and research that White brought to one of the most acclaimed children’s books of the twentieth century, I soon learned that there had been numerous Charlottes and Wilburs and Templetons in his life—but that there was indeed a particular clever spider who helped inspire the book.

Robert and Mary Gallant showed us the barn cellar, where White kept the pigs that inspired Wilbur. We saw the stalls for sheep and cattle, the doorway that had held the webs of countless orb weavers, the path through the woods, the rocky pasture with its view of Allen Cove and misty Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. We stayed for a while in the boathouse down by the water. As I sat at the plank table White had built, I noticed that a patterned brown spider hung motionless in a web to my right.

Many novelists admit that their characters are inspired by real individuals, but it seldom occurs to us that the authors of children’s fantasy might make the same confession. Yet examples abound. Brave and levelheaded Alice was based upon the young Miss Liddell. The name of the Dodo in Wonderland reflects Lewis Carroll’s stuttering trouble in pronouncing his true surname, Dodgson. Christopher Robin was not only a real boy but actually often played inside a large hollow tree on the Milne property—and Eeyore is gloomy because a broken wire in Christopher’s toy donkey made its head hang low. Most of the characters in Beatrix Potter’s stories she drew from life as well, because she spent her days with rabbits and ducks on Hill Top Farm in the Lake District.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising to learn that, while composing his most popular book, E. B. White was obeying a cherished maxim: Write about what you know. He knew his characters from the barns and stables where he spent much of his childhood and adulthood. He knew a barn’s earthy smells and sounds, the variety of its animal population. Charlotte’s Web was hardly a simple report from the barn, as White claimed, but it grew from his experiences there with many animals. His return to a barn in adulthood ignited smoldering memories of the stable in his childhood home in Mount Vernon, New York. By creating a fictional hybrid of the most enchanted settings from both childhood and adulthood, White became one of the rare authors who solve what the American critic and essayist Clifton Fadiman once called the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.

White’s attitude toward nature, with its unblinking response to the inevitability of death, strikes me as realistically hardheaded despite being wrapped in anthropomorphism. A farmer who wrote children’s fantasies needed both ways of thinking. During my research I became fascinated by other aspects of White’s personality as well. From childhood to old age, he was painfully shy, terrified of speaking in public or before a microphone—yet hugely ambitious and willing to try almost anything when no one was looking. Afraid of commitment and romance and confrontation, he hid behind animals even in his early love poems and letters to his wife.

Charlotte’s Web is about animals because throughout his long life animals were E. B. White’s favorite acquaintances. He had plenty of friends; he got along well with editors and other colleagues; he was happily married and a proud father, stepfather, and eventually grandfather. But he liked to spend as much time as possible around nonhuman creatures. This boy, wrote White about himself as a child, felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people. It’s all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship with E. B. White.

The book for which most people cherish him fits into a long-standing tradition in literature—tales of animals who think and speak like human beings. From Aesop’s ungrateful eagle through the trickster fox Reynard in the Middle Ages, from the autobiography of Black Beauty in the nineteenth century to the quest of Despereaux in the twenty-first, talking animals have accompanied us throughout history. Folklore around the world laments our loss of innocence in the golden age of humanity, when we could speak with our fellow creatures. In Charlotte’s Web this lost era is childhood.

Remember that writing is translation, White wrote to a student while composing this tale about the animals in his barn, and the opus to be translated is yourself. The Story of Charlotte’s Web explores how White translated his own passions and contradictions, delights and fears, into a book that has had astonishingly broad appeal across age groups and national boundaries. He knew that empathy is a creative act, an entering into another’s reality. Empathy and curiosity happily coexisted in his spacious imagination. He studied the lives of spiders for a year before writing his novel. I discovered, quite by accident, he explained, that reality and fantasy make good bedfellows.

White himself emphasized that biographical writing is always a matter of interpretation—and he was wary of it. As I wrote this book, I became aware that, although I was determined to portray Elwyn Brooks White as accurately as possible, he was also becoming a character in a particular story I wanted to tell. I invented nothing; to the best of my ability, I misrepresented nothing. But by focusing on particular aspects of his career, such as his interest in natural history and farming, I have produced an account inevitably biased toward this facet of his life. His writings about government and civil rights, for example, find little room here, and beyond his childhood I don’t explore his relationship with his family in depth. I hesitated over presuming to refer to White by his first name, but this is a personal book about his intimate daily life, so in childhood I call him Elwyn and in adulthood Andy—the latter a nickname he acquired at Cornell and kept for the rest of his life. This book is a biographical narrative distilled from hundreds of sources, but at every stage I tried to keep in mind that these people did not know what was going to happen next.

More than a quarter century after his death, E. B. White lives in our cultural dialogue. Some of his personal essays are canonized anthology standards, and to the connoisseur of the genre he stands beside Montaigne. Students underline every axiom in The Elements of Style. Charlotte’s Web is better known than Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn and usually described as beloved. How beloved? Charlotte’s Web has already sold many millions of copies; in annual summaries of bestselling children’s books in the United States, often it still outsells even Winnie-the-Pooh. For Publishers Weekly, a poll of librarians, teachers, publishers, and authors, asked to list the best children’s books ever published in the United States, set Charlotte’s Web firmly in first place. A 2000 survey listed Charlotte’s Web as the bestselling children’s book in U.S. history, with Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan both following in the top one hundred. As of 2010, Charlotte’s Web has been translated into thirty-five foreign languages. Thus every day somewhere in the world, countless children and adults are opening the book and turning to the first page and reading in English or Norwegian or Chinese or braille:

Where’s Papa going with that ax? said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.…

Part I

Elwyn

Our rich experiences, as a child, were secret, unexpected, and unreported.

Chapter 1

Enchanted

He lived a life of enchantment; virtually everything he saw and heard was being seen and heard by him for the first time, so he gave it his whole attention.

The coachman said the eggs would never hatch. They were infertile, he insisted, as he tossed them onto the manure pile outside the stable. Elwyn’s indulgent father had bought his children an incubator with fifty eggs and only these three failed to hatch. Barely more than a toddler, skinny big-eared Elwyn had stretched on tiptoe to peer over the edge of a workbench and excitedly witness the primordial ritual of chicks’ tapping inside their shells as they prepared to emerge into the world. He didn’t want to give up on the remaining eggs—and later he was the first to hear a cheeping sound outdoors. He ran outside, thrilled to find that the chicks had hatched by themselves, rejected by human beings and incubated by nothing more than the manure pile’s own natural warmth. The birds were scurrying around, tiny and wet and rumpled, squawking hungrily.

The stable was behind the family’s spacious home in Mount Vernon, New York. During his childhood in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was one of Elwyn White’s favorite places. Painted pale gray, matching their big, handsome house even to the gables in the loft, it had a square towerlike peak that sported a weather vane as high as the domed turret on the front of the house. Elwyn loved the pungent scent of hay in the stable’s loft above his head and of the dusty oats in their bin with its chute that carried grain down to the three stalls below. He liked to walk into the dark stable, through the coach doorway created when the main door slid left into its wall pocket, and find himself surrounded by the exciting wild scent of the horses themselves. In front the barn was lit by a small, four-paned window to the right of the sliding door, as well as by a couple of similar windows in the loft, on each side of the high door that opened downward for loading or unloading wagons. Still the corners inside were always enticingly dark, the light angling down and splashing on hay to turn it golden. Outside, to the left of the big door, stood a lattice-walled stall, and nearby was the fragrant manure pit whose warmth rescued the chicks. Sometimes the coachman, Jimmy Bridges—whom Elwyn admiringly followed around—smelled more horsey than human, mixed with the aroma of liniment and harness dressing. Bridges had his own private room upstairs among the hay bales. Most of the coachmen in the neighborhood were Irish immigrants, friendly to Elwyn and his pals; often he knew a friend’s stable well without ever having entered his home.

Young Elwyn tended various animals in the stable, especially birds; he kept pigeons, chickens, a turkey, ducks, geese. He helped with the horses as much as he was allowed, and a hutch housed his soft-furred, big-eyed rabbits. But not every animal there belonged to the White family. Elwyn enjoyed watching the predatory antics of a stray cat that sometimes camped out under the stable. And sneaking around the stalls, as well as nesting under them, were thieves who added a frisson of villainy to the happy scene—rats. Elwyn saw no contradiction in loving mice and hating rats.

From early childhood, Elwyn found the dark and pungent stable intoxicatingly rich in romantic associations of life and death and adventure. But it was also a refuge where a thoughtful young boy could spend time by himself. From infancy, he saw barns and stables and farms in a symbolic light. The White family owned a toy farm that had belonged to Elwyn’s mother in her own childhood—an entire nighttime scene with moon and stars in a dark blue sky over a bucolic farm with toy sheep and cows. My dream farm, she called it. Every December she placed this peaceful miniature world at the foot of the Christmas tree, where its barn and duck pond were at Elwyn’s eye level as he sprawled on the rug and wondered what was inside the colorfully wrapped Christmas gifts behind it.

Much of the year in New York, the stable was too cold for animals less hardy than the rats. Because his mother wouldn’t allow a dog in her handsome and well-kept home, Elwyn kept his first of a long parade of canines, a bright-eyed collie named Mac, in the always dank cellar. The dog’s bed was near the nineteenth-century servants’ toilet that Elwyn sometimes sneaked down to use, although now and then he walked past it to secretly pee into the coal bin instead. Keeping Mac in the cold and dark left Elwyn racked with guilt. Whenever he opened the big door, the dog was already at the top of the stairs, waiting with barely leashed affection and smelling of ashes and darkness. In better weather, Mac was assigned a sheepskin-lined bed in the barn. He accompanied Elwyn on neighborhood explorations, panting happily and looking back over his shoulder to keep an eye on his young master. For years, as Elwyn returned from school in his beret and tweedy knickers and high-button shoes, he found Mac waiting at the same rendezvous to escort him home. Sometimes Elwyn would sneak Mac into the public library, where the dog would lie on the wooden floor nearby as Elwyn tried to decipher Virgil or worked on other schoolwork or simply prowled the shelves. The drowsy quiet of one spring evening at the library was shattered when Mac heard the high-pitched yap of a poodle outdoors and bounded to the window to reply in deep barks that resounded throughout the building—startling a white-haired old man nearby out of his browse through a magazine.

There were secretive animals in Elwyn’s life as well. His many childhood illnesses included severe hay fever and other allergies. Once, while he was sick in bed, a fearless young house mouse not only visited him in his bedroom but proved interested enough in this large but quiet neighbor to gradually become a tamed pet. Elwyn supplied him with a house and watched rapt as the mouse explored with its tiny paws and turned its dark eyes to look up at him. He even taught it several tricks. He also kept an array of less cuddly pets—frogs and turtles, caterpillars and lizards, canaries and snakes—but they didn’t come alive in his imagination the same way that mice did, with their fellow-mammal warmth and air of miniature humanity.

The basement and stable were havens for even smaller animals that caught the boy’s eye. In every corner of the stable, from stall planks near the ground to roof beams above the hayloft, different kinds of spiders spun their webs and waited for manna to fall into them. Some of the spiders were anonymous gray smudges in cobwebby corners, others elegantly patterned and displayed in the center of their web like a cameo in a necklace. All of the webs were wonderfully engineered and many were beautiful. The stable’s sweaty animals and fresh dung attracted countless flies and other insects that ended their brief lives struggling in a spiderweb. Nearby, chicks were hatched and foals born. A scurry and squawk in the eaves might mean a snake or a rat had invaded the barn swallow’s nest and eaten eggs. For a sheltered middle-class suburban child, the stable provided a memorable everyday glimpse of a world that managed to be both beautiful and cruel.

My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom … It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the I. … To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth.

AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, during Theodore Roosevelt’s first term as president after the assassination of William McKinley, Mount Vernon was already a popular bedroom community for New Yorkers. In Westchester County, bordering the Bronx, it rose west of New Rochelle, perched high on shady, rolling hills. The three-story White family home, which they had built eight years before Elwyn’s birth, was atop Chester Hill, in a street inevitably named Summit Avenue, half an hour’s train commute from the center of Manhattan to the southwest. The hill was high enough that, on quiet days, a good wind would carry to the house the somber foghorn of the lighthouse that guarded the reef called Execution Rocks, on Sands Point to the southeast across Long Island Sound. Gabled Queen Anne houses with large wraparound porches lined Summit Avenue. In this calm and leafy neighborhood, the scent of honeysuckle and lilac drifted in at their windows, where the maid lowered shades halfway on bright days but raised the window so that filmy sheers fluttered in the breeze. The Whites’ lawn at 101 Summit, on the corner of East Sidney, was bright with iris, pansies, and showy-blossomed crabapple and pear trees, in delicate contrast to the black cast-iron urn; in the spring, jonquils and multicolored tulips outlined the property boundary along the sidewalk, beyond the privet hedge. A sprinkling cart still patrolled the streets to keep down the dust. Automobiles were just beginning to be seen chugging by; their backfiring still brought children and adults running to get a closer look at the newfangled contraptions.

The house faced Summit, but the stable—that essential building and status symbol—faced Sidney. In Elwyn’s early childhood, the family traveled mostly in carriages. A subset of Whites could get about in a simple buggy whose roof, in good weather, folded back behind the single seat. Elwyn would come out of the house onto the roofed porch above the carriageway and race down the stairs to where a dark gelding stood hitched to a buggy, his eyes watchful, his tail switching flies. But for Elwyn’s parents to take the whole family out required a surrey, with three wide seats under a flat roof whose fringe never stopped wiggling during the ride. As the well-dressed family filed down the stairs on special occasions, the surrey looked elegant waiting in dappled shade at the corner of the big gray house.

Elwyn thought of this house as his fortress. The ogee dome on the octagonal turret inspired medieval daydreams. From one of the tall windows on the third floor of the turret, above the screened porch, he imagined himself watching enemies sneak up from behind neighborhood trees or lurk around the privet hedge that surrounded the yard. In his mind a brace of cannon guarded the long second-floor porches. On hot, sticky summer nights he slept alone in a hammock on the screened porch and anxiously listened to nighttime noises in the yard. Why were those leaves rustling? Was that a twig snapping? In the dawn he woke to scuffing horse hooves and the creak of a wagon, followed by the glassy music of milk bottles being set down by back doors. It sounded like home and safety to him. Weekend and summer mornings, the rising sun found him going out to brave the uncertain world, knowing that when he encountered trouble he could always return home to the safe family castle.

He was the last of seven children, but one before him had left the world so quickly that her death in infancy was seldom mentioned. Apparently Elwyn was unexpected. His father was forty-five and his mother forty-one when Elwyn Brooks (soon nicknamed En) was born on the eleventh of July 1899. Two of his sisters were already in their mid- and late teens, and his brothers Stanley and Albert were eight and eleven. By the time he was three, his oldest sister, Marion, was already getting married. Elwyn’s earliest faint memory was of the parlor roped off to form aisles for Marion’s wedding, which occurred shortly before he turned three. The closest sibling to his own age was his five-years-older redheaded sister, Lillian.

For the first several years of his life, Elwyn’s Victorian parents dressed him in clothes as girlish as Lillian’s. In 1902, when Elwyn was three, Buster Brown first appeared as a comic strip

Reviews for The Story of Charlotte's Web

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If "The Story of Charlotte's Web" by Michael Sims reads as much like a biography of E.B. White as the story of how White's most famous book came to be, it may be because White's whole life was about the writing of that single book. His boyhood interest in animals and nature in general laid the groundwork for "Charlotte's Web." His development as a writer and the attention to detail he learned as a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine groomed him for writing his masterpiece. His move to his Maine farm with his wife, Katharine, an editor at The New Yorker, inspired him and provided the opportunity for his imagination to soar.White made other notable contributions to literature. His essays are still read today. His other novels for children, "Stuart Little" and "The Trumpet of the Swan," are themselves classics. "The Elements of Style," in which White revised and improved upon the work of his college professor, William Strunk Jr., remains a valuable resource for writers old and young. Yet White reached the pinnacle of his career with the publication of his story about the spider who saved the life of a pig.Sims gives his readers amazing detail about how the book came to be. An actual spider at White's farm inspired it. White devoted hours to studying that spider and others to observe their behavior. He poured over books about spiders. Maybe real spiders don't spin English words into their webs, but otherwise White wanted Charlotte to behave like a barn spider. He even insisted that, children's book or not, she must die after laying her eggs because that is what real spiders do.Sims provides several examples of how White revised his manuscript over and over again, crossing out words and trying new ones in their place. He agonized over what to name certain characters and what Charlotte should say about Wilbur in her web. "Pig Supreme" was among the contenders until White settled on "Some Pig."Anyone who has enjoyed Charlotte's Web, and that means millions of readers, will enjoy reading what Sims has to say about that book and the man who wrote it.

[pensivecat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Who wasn't moved by Charlotte's Web at some point in their childhood? It was a pleasure to understand how the story developed over E.B. White's ('Andy's') life. His fondness for animals and their "personality", coupled with his shy personality speaks volumes. Also an interesting snapshot of the time period (especially in New York!)

[dickmanikowski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've long been a fan of E. B. White's writing. Not only are his own essays and books incredibly graceful and appealing in a non-pretentious way, his writing style feels so . . . natural. And his revision of Prof. Strunk's "The Elements of Style" is an invaluable guide.I know I've read "Charlotte's Web" (though probably as a young adult rather than a child), and I have fond memories of it.This wonderful book by Michael Sims combines a biography of White with an intriguing account of the writing of the story of the wise spider and the pig who didn't want to die. Sims shows how White's lifelong love affair with farming led him to compose what I consider to be the best children's book ever written . . . not that I have any credentials to pass that judgment.Thank you, Michael Sims. I happened to see this book on the library's New Books shelf, and that was serendipity. But when I dig out my copy of "The Elements of Style" and check out a copy of "Charlotte's Web," that won't be coincidental.

[vanderschloot · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a wonderful book. It's an biography of both White and of his beloved children's classic. The book leaves you feeling grateful to Sims for bringing us this story and doing it justice with his charming writing. It's such a great idea to tell the story of an author through most well-known work. White's book becomes the lens through which we see the author, and the author's life becomes the lens through which we come to understand the deeper meaning of Charlotte's Web.

[mrslee_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Charlotte's Web was a favorite of mine as a young girl, inspiring me to raise pigs for 4H, rather than the cattle my siblings had raised. Of course I named my first pig Wibur and yes, my Wilbur was Some Pig, too. So I was thrilled to receive The Story of Charlotte's Web by Michael Sims. Having read one other book by Mr. Sims I was looking forward to this biography and was not disappointed. He begins with E. B. White's early life and influences, helping us to see the events and people who shaped his worldview and writing. The book really picked up interest for me when White married Katharine Angell and they moved to the farm. The events and details which conspired to inspire him to the writing of Charlotte's Web were fun to read about. Mr. Sims has included lots of notes and references at the end, which I always enjoy reading. I had never paid much attention to Stuart Little before, it not being my favorite, but now I think I will read it again, possibly with more insight. Thank you Mr. Sims, for giving us a glimpse into this wonderful writer's life.

[nelliemc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am a passionate fan of E.B. White and not primarily for his children's books, though Charlotte's Web is anything but just a children's book. I've read all of the anthologies of his columns and his wryly humorous and understated perception is just very appealing; I've also read his biographies. This book makes a worthy contribution to my collection, adding insights into White that haven't been there before. It's not a full scale biography, nor is it literary review; it's rather a study of the creative process focused in on one book. I found it to be unique in this regard and quite fascinating. The author obviously admires White, but isn't entirely uncritical and that also helps. Admirers of White, Charlotte's Web, or those curious about how creative literature happens should all enjoy this book. I think it would help if you had some knowledge of White's life before reading this, but it really isn't necessary. Oh, and I received this book through the Early Reader's program, and must thank the publisher for sending the full hardbound copy, completely as published. It's beautifully done and the photos are great to have.

[richardderus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Book Report: The well-studied life of Andy and Katharine White, The New Yorker's original power couple, would seem to be infertile territory for new and original uses of its rich, deep material. There have been books and books on the magazine, on the couple, on the people that they knew and the world they both created and lived in. But no one until now connected Andy, nature, and Charlotte's Web, arguably one of the 20th century's most influential children's books.Sims does this unusual job deftly, providing us with the bare facts of Andy's life, expanding upon those facets that serve his thesis that E.B. "Andy" White was less a social maladroit than a man in love with the natural world, and not greatly interested in most of the manufactured world around him; this slantwise perspective is what allowed the shy guy to see the story he would write, where others would merely have killed the pig for supper and brushed the web aside on the way out of the barn.Due attention is given to the work life and the marriage of the man, and since that's well-trodden territory, the author leaves it in bare-bones form. I agree with this decision because it lets him get to the more involving parts of the story: Why did Charlotte come to be? What forces shaped the story, where did they come from, and how did this book make its journey from brainstorm to commercial success? Here is Sims's strength: He never bloviates about His Ideas, he distills a prodigious amount of reading, thinking, and talking into a nuanced, interesting, and immersive read about a book that, I suspect, most of us remember quite clearly encountering for the first time.My Review: I disliked Stuart Little as a boy. I'd seen the dog give birth before I read it for the first time; I told my mother, "That story's stupid, she couldn't have had a baby that small alive." Mama looked at me a minute and said, "You're a very practical person, aren't you daaahlin?" (My mother was Southern.) She then gave me Charlotte's Web. I was forever changed. Death entered my world. I don't mean awareness of it; I mean the *experience* of death, when Charlotte dies, was completely and utterly real for me. Absence. Empty space where before was an important life. Re-reading the book, as I did three or four times, couldn't make death go away. Charlotte was gone, that was that, no way was she coming back and her daughters weren't her. It took some time to recover from this blow.And then several things happened: 1) I found out the same guy wrote this wonderful book as the dumb mouse-boy book. 2) I suddenly, in a great flash, realized that stories require readers to live, and even if Charlotte was dead, the story wasn't. 3) Maybe Stuart Little wasn't as bad as I thought it was, because the same guy told it! (Actually, I still think it's stupid, and I don't like it to this good day, forty-four years later.)So this book arrives from its publisher, all pretty and invitingly designed, and it's about the book that changed my worldview, and it's got that great new-book, ink-and-paper smell; well, what else to do but put down everything I was reading and all the chores I should be doing, curl up on my breezy, cool sunporch, and immerse myself in the story of the story I've adored for most of my life?I am so very glad that I did. I feel refreshed and energized, ready to take on my own storytelling tasks with renewed vigor. The book isn't life-altering, or possessed of an outsized grandeur, or elucidative of the Mysteries of the Ages, so I can't make a case fo perfection; but to anyone who, as a sensitive child, was altered by that first encounter with Charlotte's Web, I recommend this book as a balm for your worn-out, worn-in adult soul.

[clue_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Elwyn Brooks White was born into a wealthy family in Mount Vernon, N.Y. in 1899. The family lived on a small farm where E. B. (Andy) showed, even as a small child, a fascination with nature that remained throughout his life and became the basis of much of his writing including Charlotte's Web, published in 1952. White had been a professional writer for decades before writing this book that has been loved by children and adults alike all over the world. Sims tells all of White's story though including his writing as a child, his years as a writer and contributing editor at the The New Yorker and other books he authored and co-authored. His personal life is well told too, particularly his relationship with his wife Katherine Angell, who was also at The New Yorker in it's early days.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was a few months old when E. B. White's classic children's book Charlotte's Web was published. My First Grade teacher read the book aloud to my class. As a girl, I read it many times, and when our son was born I read it to him as well. And the older I become the more I realize the impact the story had on my life.Knowing my esteem for the book, my son gifted me Michael's Sims book Charlotte's Web: E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic for Christmas. It was a lovely read, entertaining and enlightening.White had a love of nature and animals. As a child, his family spent their summers in Maine, and in spite of his allergies, it was the highlight of the year. As an adult, he and his wife Katherine purchased a farm in Maine--with a view of Mount Cadalliac on Mt. Desert Isle across the water. My husband and I spent many summers camping at Acadia National Park! It is a beautiful area.White admired the popular columnist Don Marquis who created the characters Archy--a cockroach--and Mehitible--a cat. White liked how Marquis kept his animal characters true to their nature while using them for social satire. Archy inspired the character of Charlotte.I was a teen when I discovered Marquis on a friend's parent's bookshelf. I borrowed the book and later bought my own copy.White's first children's book was the best-selling Stuart Little, illustrated by Garth Williams who was just beginning his career. Williams was established by the time he contributed his art to Charlotte's Web. He created beloved illustrations for Little Golden Books and authors like Margaret Wise Brown and Laura Ingalls Wilder.I enjoyed the details about White's writing process. He worked on the novel over a long period, carefully considering every aspect, even setting it aside for a year. He researched spiders in detail. He sketched his farm as a model. He thought carefully about what words Charlotte would spin into her web. White hated rats, and kept Templeton's nature intact without a personality change. Fern was a later addition.Sims reproduces the text from the manuscripts with White's editing. I am always fascinated by seeing an author's edits and the development of a story.White's name was also well known to me as it appears on The Elements of Style, which started as a pamphlet written by White's professor Strunk!White's wife Katherine wrote a column on gardening, Onward and Upward in the Garden, which was published in a book form after her death--and which I had read upon its publication!

[bigpinkmarshmallow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is quite simply a brilliant book. Even if you don’t have the vaguest interest in E.B.White’s life or the genesis of Charlotte’s Web, I’m sure you’d still manage to find something in it to intrigue or delight you. Literary biography is a difficult monster to tackle; too much focus on the literary and you lose the people who want to know the juicy details of the life, and too much focus on the biography and you lose those who want to understand the writing process and how much of the writer went into the work. Michael Sims straddles the line between the two perfectly, and has created a sublime piece of writing that is heartfelt, humorous, fascinating and moving. I actually couldn’t put it down, and that’s a first for me when it comes to non fiction. I knew very little about E B White before I read this and now I am desperate to read more.Sims begins with exploring E.B.White’s idyllic Edwardian childhood in a large house in Mount Vernon, a New York suburb. The youngest of seven children, Elwyn Brooks White was born in 1899 to prosperous, already middle aged parents, who were well educated and encouraged creativity and a spirit of adventure in their children. White’s next sibling in line was 5 years older than him and so from a young age he grew used to playing alone and retreating into a world of his imagination. Behind his house was a large barn for the family’s horses, as White grew up in a world that still largely used horse and cart as a means of getting around. White adored spending time in the barn with the horses, and developed a keen interest in the animal world, often preferring animals to people. Painfully shy, he found it difficult to form relationships, especially with girls, and the highlight of his year was always the family’s vacations to the beautiful Maine coast, where he was free to ramble in the stunning countryside and enjoy the natural world around him.As he progressed into his teen and college years, White developed his love of writing into a successful talent, being published in juvenile magazines and college papers. On graduation, he moved around for a while, working in various jobs in New York while submitting stories and essays to a range of magazines. One of these magazines was a fledgling production entitled The New Yorker, and one of the young editors there, a Mrs Katherine Angell, was so impressed by his writing that she asked him to join the permanent staff. There began White’s writing career; as a columnist, satirist and essayist, he swiftly found himself becoming one of the nation’s most adored writers, with his gentle, witty and observant voice on all manner of topics, from New York to romance. In 1929 he married the newly divorced Katherine, beginning what would be a long and happy partnership.After his marriage, E.B.White grew tired of New York and longed for a home in Maine, which was to him an enchanted land of unspoiled nature and glittering oceans. So, he and Katherine bought a farm at Allen Cove, a coastal town, and they proceeded to split their time between New York and Maine for the rest of their lives. White adored his farm, mostly because of how close it allowed him to be to his animals. No gentleman farmer, White insisted on doing the work himself, rearing his animals, caring for them, and finally killing them, something that never ceased to disturb him. The huge barn joined to the house was a place of comfort and solace, and it was spotting a spider in the barn that first gave him the idea for what would be his greatest legacy; Charlotte’s Web. Eager to write a book for children that did not talk down to them, and that did not infantilise or unrealistically portray animals and their motivations and behaviour, White spent five years agonizing over the writing of Charlotte’s Web. The finished article was ultimately a distillation of his admirably positive, curious and idealistic attitude towards life. Its success was instant; and no man deserved it more.Sims goes into much detail about the genesis of Charlotte’s Web, and also of Stuart Little, which I haven’t read, exploring White’s writing process and interests in fascinating chapters that include how deeply White researched spiders in order to accurately portray Charlotte’s thoughts and actions. However, the greatest joy of the book is how sensitively, affectionately and movingly he brings White to life. An anxious and shy man, he lacked self esteem and was incredibly nervous in public. He constantly worried about his health and about what others thought of him, writing long letters to his wife about such incidents as preparing for his death when he found his face to be swollen before finding out it was just sunburn, and his worries about how terrible he thought his writing was. At the same time, however, he was incredibly courageous and daring, and loved to try new things, albeit when nobody else was watching. Loving, warm, loyal and hilariously funny, White never missed an opportunity to poke fun at himself and was a much adored friend to all he knew. He loved animals and children, and was never happier than when he was on his farm. However, he also loved the buzz of New York, writing one of his most famous essays, Here is New York, about its many delights.Sims effortlessly weaves a tale of a contradictory, extraordinary and endearing man, whose love of life and of nature came together in Charlotte’s Web to create a book that reveals the beauty of its writer’s soul on every page. I felt rather bereft when I closed the pages, as I had come to love White and all that he had been. What a wonderful man he was, and what a fascinating life he led; the period details of New York, of life in a busy magazine office, and of the literary world the Whites inhabited totally absorbed me. This is a magnificent book that interested me on so many different levels. It really is one of the best non fiction books I’ve ever read, and I strongly urge you to read it and be transported into the world of one of America’s finest literary giants, whose heart was as golden as his beautiful prose.

[brendaough · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was immediately drawn to this book by Michael Sims about E. B. White (one of my favorite writers) and how he came about to write his famous classic, Charlotte’s Web (one of my all-time favorite books). And I did enjoy reading it very much. It is an interesting biography of E. B. White in which we are given insight into his life (as a child and then in later life as a writer/farmer in Maine) and those things which shaped his thoughts and attitudes towards nature and made him into the writer that he became. We learn, for example, that as a young rather shy boy he was often outdoors, either playing in the barn or sitting quietly watching nature. He was intrigued by books about animals and nature. As a child, he loved to be around a the animals----from the family horses to the quiet little spiders weaving their webs in the stables. The book follows his youth into early adulthood during which he begins serious writing. It makes it clear that he was passionate about his writing….he never really considered doing anything else. He began submitting stories at a very young age and had published work when he was still a child. We learn about his first job opportunities, his successful career in New York and his love for his wife Katherine.The first children’s book of White’s that became well known was Stuart Little…..another book inspired by a small animal although it was made clear that Stuart was NOT a mouse….he was a boy who LOOKED like a mouse. Stuart Little was fairly well received and E. B. White became well known also as a respected columnist at the New Yorker Magazine. He never lost his interest in animals and in this biography we learn about how his interest in the fate of his farm animals and in the small spiders that kept them company sparked his decision to write about a pig and a spider. And thus was Charlotte’s Web born. Michael Sims’s book follows how White researched spiders painstakingly for a year before he wrote his classic. He was determined to write a book that not only was a great children’s story but also would be true to the real ways of nature. The book then describes the great collaboration between E. B. White and Garth Williams, a respected illustrator who worked on both Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web as well as the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Of course, E.B.White became well known as a writer for adults and eventually updated and edited The Elements of Style but there is no doubt that he will be remembered more for his classic children’s novel, which is and has been so beloved by both children and adults.I enjoyed this biography very much. It is very well researched and written and at times (for example, when he is describing the young White swinging on the rope swing in a barn) that I felt almost like I was reading Charlotte’s Web again.. I would highly recommend it for anyone who was been touched by one of the most famous and beloved children’s books of all time.,

[moibibliomaniac · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am not a fan of children's books in general––unless I'm reading one to one of my grandchildren. But I am a fan of well-written books. And this is one well-written book about a well-written children's book: Charlotte's Web.As I was reading the first few chapters of this book, I got the impression that the author was embellishing the story by stretching the truth just a wee bit. I even said to myself, "Now how did he know that?" Finally, I went to the back of the book, and that settled it: I questioned Mr. Sims no more. In the back of the book, I found no less than 486 notes identified by page numbers, which referred to singular occurrences in E.B. Whites life, and childhood thoughts and fears that even his mother didn't know about. I found no less than 67 sources cited in these 486 notes, from which the author paints a literary picture of E. B. White's life for us.And that's what this book is all about. Mr. Sims shows us that Charlotte's Web wasn't simply a figment of E.B. White's imagination, but rather a remembrance of White's own childhood. Indeed, Mr. Sims refers to a remark by P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, a remark which White himself liked: that a writer who writes successfully for children is probably writing for one child––the writer.

[abealy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

E.B. “Andy” White lived a life that seems to have led, by a pre-determined straight path to the inevitable publication of his masterpiece, Charlotte’s Web.Despite growing up plagued by fears and insecurities, White led a life of pastoral brilliance and studied determination. Throughout the Great Depression the Whites’ were well off and able to live comfortably in a large home in Mt. Vernon, New York and summer in an idyllic lakeside cottage in Maine. The youngest of seven children, Andy was always drawn to a love of animals and nature. He felt more comfortable in the life of the country and used that interest to fuel a literary career that took him from the juvenile pages of St. Nicholas magazine as a child author to the hallowed halls of The New Yorker under the aegis of Harold Ross. There he met his future wife, Katherine Angell and published most of his work — initially short observations and comment, but eventually longer, more studied essay.Michael Sims writes with a warm and generous authority and with an obvious love for his subject. The book smoothly carries the reader through White’s New Yorker days, his marriage to Katherine and their eventual move to a farm in Allen Cove, Maine, while maintaining a two-floor apartment in Manhattan. Life was good.In the country White is able to focus on a new children’s book (he had already published Stuart Little) and his study of the natural world of spiders, pigs and other denizens of the farm adds authority and believability to the charm of Charlotte’s Web.

[sweeks1980 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From past experience, I’ve found that writing a book about another book’s genesis is very difficult. The resulting works are usually somewhere between interesting but unexplored minutiae or gushy biography. Luckily, Michael Sims manages to avoid both pitfalls in “The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic.” Tracing White’s life from his childhood to his tenure at "The New Yorker" to his writing of "Charlotte’s Web," Sims manages to write a deft and thoughtful examination of the author, his writing style, and his curious, and fascinating, relationship with nature.Although the book certainly has slow patches (the opening chapters in particular seemed to take a while to get going ), overall it is very enjoyable and incredibly detailed. What’s more, almost everything that Sims includes in the book, from White’s hesitancy regarding romance to his experiences farming in Maine, relates to the book’s ultimate focus. While it might not have been entirely clear when starting the book why Sims opted to describe Samuel White’s manner of speech in the early chapters in such detail, the payoff is seeing the parallels between E. B. White’s father and John Arable, one of the characters in "Charlotte’s Web." Even more impressive is that Sims trusts his readers’ patience and intellect; rather than dropping early hints about this, Sims presents the information without apology and only mentions the connection briefly when describing the character later in the book.All in all, “The Story of Charlotte’s Web” is a fascinating and insightful look at E. B. White and the factors that led him to write “Charlotte’s Web.” Sims’s account of White’s life and habits is thorough and well-researched, and his writing clearly conveys his affection and admiration for his subject without being obsequious. Fans of White and “Charlotte’s Web” will undoubtedly enjoy this book and learn more about the work and man who wrote it.

[4daisies · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am such a huge fan of E.B. White, and of course Charlotte’s Web as well as Stuart Little are two of my top favorite books from my childhood. Anxious to learn more about this beloved author, I was excited to receive “The Story of Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic”. I enjoyed the small glimpses into his life from childhood through his death at age 86. The frustrating thing to me however, was the habit Sims had of throwing in snatches of a story and then just letting it go without ever carrying it through. I wanted to know more. Such as the passage starting at the bottom of page 60 that reads: “He never tried to further his acquaintance with Mildred elsewhere, but his thought kept returning to her bright eyes and graceful ankles. One evening after skating with her, a chilled but happy Elwyn rode the trolly home. For some time, the Summit Avenue house has been empty of other children. Quiet Marian had been married for more than a decade....”What? So what happened with Mildred? We never really hear about her again except for a brief reference to Elwyn packing the strap that they had each held one end of as they skated that night, to take with him to college. There were several times the author dropped in noteworthy tidbits, but left them shortchanged by not fully explaining their relevance or even completing the thought. Like some of the stories flew in from left field. The glimpses into his writing process were where it really got interesting. Learning about the actual farm in Main and the barn and animals that were the setting for the book was fascinating. I loved seeing photos of the drawings White did as he was conceptualizing the farm where Wilbur and Charlotte lived. The great fascination with spiders and the insistence on accuracy in portraying the orb weaver spider, all worked together to be the great strength of this book. I now look forward to re-reading Charlotte’s Web with a whole new perspective and be charmed all over again.