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

Michael Sims (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 7, 2011

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Immensely charming"—Boston Globe

"A fine stylist, Mr. Sims portrays these scenes with a beauty and an economy of language that would make the co-author of The Elements of Style proud."—Wall Street Journal

"Thorough...clear, direct and concise...a lovely and empathetic testament to E.B. White’s vision."—The Washington Post

"The Story of Charlotte’s Web is a paean to a great work and a window into the uniquely gifted man who created it."—Christian Science Monitor

"Sims offers an affectionate homage to E.B. White"—Entertainment Weekly

"An engaging, distilled, highly focused biography of White"—Salon

"Built on revealing glimpses"—USA Today

"A really lovely book"—Science Friday

"Unpacks the appeal of Charlotte's Web"—Smithsonian

"Goes back to Zuckerman's farm"—Vanity Fair

"A pocket biography"—Chicago Sun-Times

"Beautifully written and researched, the book is well worth anyone's time"—Monica Edinger, Huffington Post

 

"An affectionate biography…Packed with the same kind of sensory detail its subject reveled in, this account is an honorable addition to the literature of letters."—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Michael Sims is the author of the acclaimed Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, and editor of the recent Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories and The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime He lives in western Pennsylvania.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company; First Edition edition (June 7, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802777546
• ISBN-13: 978-0802777546
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #524,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 63 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book about a wonderful book June 17, 2011

By Richard Derus

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Lots of detail, some of it fascinating July 7, 2011

By Jaylia3 TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Anyone who is a fan of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web or who is interested in the writing process will find the long, detailed sections describing its creation fascinating. While I usually enjoy learning about the inspiration behind works of literature this account had too much minutiae for me. There were other parts of the book, however, that I found a lot more engrossing. I loved reading about life in the northeastern US during the early years of the last century, when automobiles were replacing horse-drawn vehicles and White's father proudly bought a car but never learned to drive it, when a fancy teenage date meant an afternoon of tea, cinnamon toast and dancing at the Plaza Hotel, and when people flocked to the new Childs restaurants because they were inexpensive, fast and, at a time when people were newly afraid of germs, gleamingly clean. It was also a revelation to read about the early days of The New Yorker from E.B. White's quiet, quirky perspective--most of the other accounts I've come across have been in books about the rowdy members of the Algonquin Round Table.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars E. B. White Would Have Loved This Piece of Prose July 9, 2011

By C. E. Selby

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"The spider lived on the underside of the barn's roof. Sheltered from the elements by an overhang, her web was an elegant orb whose loops and strands glittered on dewy mornings like an antique necklace. Every night she made the rounds of her miniature cosmos, tightly wrapping prey, cutting loose and jettisoning debris, reweaving broken strands."
That is a taste of the beautiful prose in this delightful book, prose that would make the master of it--E. B. White--ever so proud.
"Write what you know!" How I recall reading that E. B. White line years ago. And for the decades that I have taught writing--public schools and now college level--I had been faithful to E. B. White's advice. And most assuredly so has Michael Sims in this wonderful tribute to the author who studied spiders for years before making the decision that he was ready to create Charlotte.
The book is essentially a chronology of White's life, beginning when he, the tail-end child of a string of them, lived in a rather comfortable home in Mount Vernon, New York. I had forgotten that E. B. White--known as Andy to everyone--had been at The New Yorker almost from day one. Nor had I known that his wife, Katherine, had as well.
Mr. Sims has captured so well the sensitive nature of his subject, a boy who was enthralled with all elements of nature and who also suffered from severe anxieties, choosing frequently to write letters to people in the voice of an animal.
The reader is treated to the life the Whites lived on their Maine farm where the Atlantic washed upon it. That, of course, is where Charlotte was born, there in that Maine barn.
If you are a big E. B. White fan--and who isn't?--then I think you will find this a truly wonderful book.... I know that it is going to be a Christmas gift to a few people in my life. Read more ›

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully woven web July 23, 2011

By Tracy Barrett

Format:Hardcover

Michael Sims weaves the story of Charlotte's Web and its author with insight, clear prose, and a quiet humor that recalls E. B. White's. A great deal of research clearly lies behind the narrative, but each fact or quotation supplied is there to further the story. The many threads that came together in White's life to create the gem that is Charlotte's Web illustrate how impossible it is for an author to answer the question, "Where do you get your ideas?"