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

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book E B White was obeying 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 Painfully shy his entire life this boy White once wrote of himself felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people Its all the more impressive therefore how many people have felt a kinship with E B White With Charlottes Web which has gone on to sell more than million copies the man William Shawn called the most companionable of writers lodged his own character the avuncular author into the hearts of generations of readersIn The Story of Charlottes Web Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer how to find not another Alice but another rabbit hole by mining the raw ore of his childhood friendship with animals in Mount Vernon New York translating his own passions and contradictions delights and fears into an al-time classic Blending Whites correspondence with the likes of Ursula Nordstrom James Thurber and Harold Ross the E B White papers at Cornell and the archives of HarperCollins and the New Yorker into his own elegant narrative Sims brings to life the shy boy whose animal stories--real and imaginery--made him famous around the world.