Charlotees web

Listen to Parent Trapped , our new weekly podcast with stories and tips for getting through the pandemic. Skip to Content. Readers will learn a lot through this book's messages and may be inspired to read more children's classics or other books by E. White , such as Stuart Little. They'll also learn from Charlotte what a "Magnum Opus" is.

Charlotte's Web

Maureen Corrigan. Read An Excerpt. In a poll of librarians, teachers, publishers and authors, the trade magazine Publisher's Weekly asked for a list of the best children's books ever published in the United States.

Hands down, the No. White's Charlotte's Web. One early fall morning in , E. White walked into the barn of his farm in Maine and saw a spider web. That in itself was nothing new, but this web, with its elaborate loops and whorls that glistened with early morning dew, caught his attention.

Weeks passed until one cold October evening when he noticed that the spider was spinning what turned out to be an egg sac. White never saw the spider again and, so, when he had to return later that fall to New York City to his job as a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, White took out a razor blade and cut the silken egg sac out of the web.

He put the sac in an empty candy box, punched some holes in it, and absent-mindedly put the box atop his bedroom bureau in New York. Weeks later, a movement on that bureau alerted him to the fact that tiny spiderlings were making a Great Escape through the air holes.

White was delighted at this affirmation of life and left the hundreds of barn spiderlings alone for the next week or so — to spin webs from his hair brush to his nail scissors to his mirror — until, finally, the cleaning lady complained. Thus was hatched the idea for Charlotte's Web, White's magical meditation on the passage of time, mortality and the great gift of finding a "true friend" in this world.

However, as Michael Sims tells us in his wonderful new book called The Story of Charlotte's Web , there was also a much longer incubation period for White's classic — a period that began with his isolated childhood as the youngest of seven children; the snappy creative bustle of the New York newspaper world in the s, which gave White his career and his writing role models; and White's own lifelong struggle with anxiety.

That anxiety was soothed, in part, by writing and by the company of animals except, that is, for rats — take that, Templeton! If you love Charlotte's Web — and, please, if you don't, just get help now! He has edited several anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian fiction and poetry.

Dennis Wile hide caption. The first two-thirds or so of The Story of Charlotte's Web recounts White's life up to his 50s, when he began writing his masterpiece. Good as it is, the final section of Sims' book is the real revelation — not only about the influences on Charlotte's Web , but about just how hard it was for White to write despite the fact that his style always seemed effortless.

White was encouraged to attempt children's fiction by his wife, Katherine White, who was the fiction editor of The New Yorker and a regular reviewer of children's literature. She had urged him to write his first children's book, Stuart Little, which was published in and had taken him over six years to write. White also took inspiration from the s newspaper columnist Don Marquis, who wrote acclaimed stories about a poetic typing cockroach named Archy.

White was adamant that, like Archy, his fictional animal characters should not be cute but should remain true to their predatory and, in the case of Wilbur, their manure-loving, messy nature. The notes that White made for Charlotte's Web — some of which Sims reprints here — show a multitude of false starts and cross outs.

White finished the first draft of the novel in and then let it sit for a year. He said in a letter to his patient editor: "I've recently finished another children's book, but have put it away to ripen let the body heat out of it. It doesn't satisfy me the way it is and I think eventually I shall rewrite it pretty much. Years earlier, Moore had panned Stuart Little and now she slammed Charlotte's Web for leaving the human character of Fern "undeveloped.

White's own later estimation of his work is, perhaps, most touching. In old age, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's, White liked to have his own essays and books read to him. Sometimes, White would ask who wrote what he was listening to, and his chief reader, his son Joe, would tell him, "You did, Dad. My wife and I were in Maine, standing in the barn that had belonged to E. 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 I was in the barn that had inspired Charlotte's Web because, a few years earlier, I had been reading E. 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. 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 boat house 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 survey listed Charlotte's Web as the bestselling children's book in U. As of , 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:.

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Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams; it was published on October 15, , by Harper. Charlotte's Web is a American comedy-drama film based on the novel of the same name by E. B. White. Directed by Gary Winick and written by.

Maureen Corrigan. Read An Excerpt. In a poll of librarians, teachers, publishers and authors, the trade magazine Publisher's Weekly asked for a list of the best children's books ever published in the United States. Hands down, the No.

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Watch the video. A gentle and wise grey spider with a flair for promotion pledges to save a young pig from slaughter for dinner food. Babe, a pig raised by sheepdogs, learns to herd sheep with a little help from Farmer Hoggett. A governess uses magic to rein in the behavior of seven ne'er-do-well children in her charge. Nanny McPhee arrives to help a harried young mother who is trying to run the family farm while her husband is away at war, though she uses her magic to teach the woman's children and their two spoiled cousins five new lessons. Babe, fresh from his victory in the sheepherding contest, returns to Farmer Hoggett's farm, but after Farmer Hoggett is injured and unable to work, Babe has to go to the big city to save the farm.

Charlotte's Web is a American comedy-drama film based on the novel of the same name by E. Directed by Gary Winick and written by Susannah Grant and Karey Kirkpatrick , it is the second film adaptation of White's book, following a animated version produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. Danny Elfman composed the film's score. During springtime on a farm in Somerset County, Maine , young Fern Arable discovers her father John about to kill a runt of a litter of newborn pigs, to which she successfully begs her father to spare the piglet's life and gets the piglet which she names Wilbur and nurtures him lovingly. The next morning, Fern sneaks Wilbur in her school desk, causing commotion and for her to lie to her teacher about stowing him in her desk. The teacher forces Fern to open her desk and her classmates laugh, but the teacher sends Fern to the principal's office as punishment where Mrs. Arable is called to pick them up from school. When Wilbur has matured, Fern is regretfully forced to take him to her uncle Homer Zuckerman's barnyard. Arable feels slightly concerned for Fern's behavior and one night, prevails upon Fern to stay home, do her homework and go straight to bed. During this time, Wilbur feels abandoned and is left yearning for companionship, but is snubbed by the other animals in the barn, consisting of a serious and steadfast sheep named Samuel; a fun-loving and kindly goose couple named Gussy and Golly; two beautiful and laid-back cow sisters named Bitsy and Betsy; and a cowardly and humorous horse named Ike until he is befriended by Charlotte A.

Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. The novel tells the story of a livestock pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte.

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Charlotte's Web —the best-selling children's paperback of all time—was described by its author as "a story of friendship and salvation on a farm. But you may not know that the book's author, E. White , was himself a friend to animals. White researched every detail that went into his three books for children: Stuart Little , Charlotte's Web , and The Trumpet of the Swan For Charlotte's Web the research was close to home—at White's own farm in Maine. As a result, the barnyard of Charlotte's Web seems real in every detail, and so do the habits of its animals. Despite Charlotte's sophisticated vocabulary, she is still a spider who traps flies in her web and sucks their blood. Likewise, though Wilbur expresses deep emotions, he is still a pig who likes to lie in the mud and breathe in the warm smell of manure. Darkness settled over everything. Soon there were only shadows and the noises of the sheep chewing their cuds, and occasionally the rattle of a cow-chain up overhead. You can imagine Wilbur's surprise when, out of the darkness, came a small voice he had never heard before. It sounded rather thin, but pleasant. I've watched you all day and I like you. In Charlotte's Web , a spider saves a pig from slaughter. In real life, the author had tried to save a pig—and failed.

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