Charlotte’s Web
— 1952 —
New York: HarperCollins, 2012; 184 pages
FIRST LINES
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
“Out to the hoghouse,” replied Mrs. Arable. “Some pigs were born last night.”
“I don’t see why he needs an ax,” continued Fern, who was only eight.
PLOT SUMMARY
Girls meets pig. Girl falls in love with pig. Pig meets spider. Pig falls in love with spider.
“But it’s a children’s book,” you are probably thinking right now.
That is true. But Charlotte’s Web is also a perfect book, in oh-so-many ways.
Charlotte’s Web, for the uninitiated, is the story of a pig rescued from slaughter by an idealistic young girl named Fern. She names the pig Wilbur and nurses him until Wilbur is eventually sent to live in the nearby barn of Fern’s uncle, Homer Zuckerman.
In the extraordinary universe of that barn, Wilbur encounters the sheep, a stuttering goose, and other farm animals who fill his world and his days, along with a memorable scavenger rat named Templeton. And then, longing for a true friend, Wilbur meets one—a spider named Charlotte.
“Charlotte A. Cavatica. But just call me Charlotte.”
Charlotte will become Wilbur’s best friend. And when he is again threatened by the ax, it is Charlotte who promises to be his savior.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: E. B. WHITE
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
So, in a sense, was E. B. White.
Elwyn Brooks White was born on July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York—a small city that is one of the first stops outside New York City on the New Haven train line. It also happens to be my hometown, although I honestly did not know about my geographic connection to the man known as E. B. White until much later. He attended public schools there and then graduated from Cornell University in 1921.
After university, White worked for a series of newswires and local newspapers, and other odd work, even landing a job on a fireboat in Alaska. When White returned to New York City to work in advertising, he submitted an article to the New Yorker magazine following its launch in 1925. The magazine’s literary editor, Katharine Angell, read it and recommended that Harold Ross, the magazine’s legendary founder and editor, hire White. He did, and E. B. White contributed to the magazine for nearly six decades. White helped to shape the magazine’s central place in twentieth-century American letters.
White and Katharine Angell later married. In 1938, the Whites moved to a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine, they had purchased in 1933. It was there that he was inspired to write Charlotte’s Web (1952).
One of White’s Cornell professors was William Strunk Jr., the author of a writing manual for his students that was commercially published in 1920. In 1959, White revised and added to Strunk’s manual and it was reissued as The Elements of Style. A fundamental guide to grammar and writing structure, the book became my introduction to E. B. White as a college freshman. It is still on my bookshelf. It was also named one of the “100 Most Important Nonfiction Books” by Time magazine.
E. B. White succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease at age eighty-six in North Brooklin, on October 1, 1985. Following his death, New Yorker editor William Shawn said:
E. B. White was a great essayist, a supreme stylist. His literary style was as pure as any in our language. It was singular, colloquial, clear, unforced, thoroughly American and utterly beautiful. Because of his quiet influence, several generations of this country’s writers write better than they might have done. He never wrote a mean or careless sentence. He was impervious to literary, intellectual and political fashion. He was ageless, and his writing was timeless.
E. B. White has passed on. Charlotte and Wilbur live forever.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
I don’t know how many times I have read Charlotte’s Web. But it never gets old. And it never loses its power to move. I dare you to read it and not cry.
Now, there are two animated film versions of this book. But honestly, they pale beside the novel. In “Along Came a Spider,” a review of Charlotte’s Web for the New York Times in 1952, novelist Eudora Welty wrote:
What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time. As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.
Friendship, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain. These are not the saccharine subjects of children’s fiction. They are the enduring issues of literature. But E. B. White crystallized them in a story of such purity and elegant prose, it helps explain why Charlotte’s Web is sixth on the list of books most checked out in 125 years of the New York Public Library.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Besides Charlotte’s Web, White wrote other children’s books that became time-honored and much-beloved classics—Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. I recommend reading both—either to yourself or to a small person. But much of his fame as a writer rests on his output as a member of the New Yorker magazine staff, where he contributed essays for decades. Many of these have been collected and a favorite of mine is Here Is New York, a set of essays about the city. And The Elements of Style should be on the bookshelf of anyone who writes anything—from an email to a multivolume saga. In the spirit of Great Short Books, White wrote this characteristic piece of advice: “Omit needless words.”