Empowering Bright & Gifted Children

 

Author: E. B. White
Illustrator: Garth Williams

Interest Level: Middle Grades (4-8)
ATOS Reading Level: 4.4
AR Points: 5.0
Publisher Recommended Age: 8-12
Publisher: HarperCollins
Book Type: Paperback
Pages: 192

 

 

Wilbur, the pig, is desolate when he discovers that he is destined to be the farmer's Christmas dinner until his spider friend, Charlotte, decides to help him.

 

Publishers Weekly listed the Charlotte's Web as the best-selling children's paperback of all time as of 2000.

 

 

ALA Booklist: "Wilbur, a lovable pig, is rescued from a cruel fate by a beautiful and intelligent spider named Charlotte. Told with delicacy, humor, and wisdom…a perfect blending of fantasy and complete realism.”

 

The New York Times Book Review: "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."

 

The New Yorker: "High caprice on a farm, handled with wit and wisdom, (that) serves to put an imperfect world back into joint."

 

 

E.B. White (July 11, 1899, Mount Vernon, New York – October 1, 1985, North Brooklin, Maine) was an American writer. Although named Elwyn Brooks White by his parents, White used his initials in professional writings all his life.

 

White graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1921. He picked up the nickname "Andy" at Cornell, where tradition confers that moniker on any male student surnamed White, after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White.

 

In the late 1930s, White turned his hand to children's fiction on behalf of a niece, Janice Hart White. His first children's book, Stuart Little, was published in 1945, and Charlotte's Web appeared in 1952. Stuart Little received a lukewarm welcome from the literary community at first, due in part to the reluctance to endorse it by Anne Carroll Moore, the retired but still powerful children's librarian from the New York Public Library.

 

However, both went on to receive high acclaimed and in 1970, jointly won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a major prize in the field of children's literature. In the same year, he published his third children's novel, The Trumpet of the Swan. In 1973, that book received the Sequoyah Award from Oklahoma and the William Allen White Award from Kansas, both of which were awarded by students voting for their favorite book of the year.

 

In 1959, White edited and updated The Elements of Style. This handbook of grammatical and stylistic dos and don'ts for writers of American English had been written and published in 1918 by William Strunk, Jr., one of White's professors at Cornell. White's rework of the book was extremely well received, and further editions of the work followed in 1972, 1979, and 1999; an illustrated edition followed in 2005. That same year, a New York composer named Nico Muhly premiered a short opera based on the book. The volume is a standard tool for students and writers and remains required reading in many composition classes.

 

In 1978, White won a special Pulitzer Prize for his work as a whole. Other awards he received included a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and memberships in a variety of literary societies throughout the United States.

 

White married Katharine Sergeant Angell in 1929, also an editor at The New Yorker, and author (as Katharine White) of Onward and Upward in the Garden. They had a son, Joel White, a naval architect and boatbuilder, who owned Brooklin Boatyard in Brooklin, Maine. Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, has spent decades as a fiction editor for The New Yorker and is well-known as the magazine's baseball writer. White was related to James White who was a Methodist preacher in Missouri.

 

White died on October 1, 1985, at his farm home in North Brooklin, Maine, after a long fight with Alzheimer's Disease. He was buried beside his wife at the Brooklin Cemetery.