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." It's all
the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship
with E. B. White. With Charlotte's Web, which has gone on to sell
more than 45 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 readers.
In The Story of Charlotte's 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 White's 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.
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