The story of Charlotte's Web : E. B. White's eccentric life in nature and the birth of an American classic

 by Michael Sims. Sims (Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form), as a droll observer of the natural world and editor of the annotated edition of one of E.B. White's formative influences, Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel, is uniquely qualified to write what is a biography of Charlotte's Web as much as it's a biography of White. White's childhood fascination with the world's smaller denizens and his literary career, including his storied history at The New Yorker, are traced by Sims to their climax in the germination of the plot for Charlotte's Web. Like Beatrix Potter, whose children's stories about anthropomorphized animals were written a half-century before, White consciously avoided moralizing and instead attempted naturalistic faithfulness. Although his children's books were extremely successful and tourists flocked unbidden to his Maine farm each year for his birthday, he longed for solitude throughout his life and felt the greatest connection with animals; Sims successfully argues that Charlotte's Web unintentionally became a "summary of what it felt like to be E.B. White." VERDICT Scholars of children's literature as well as fans-child and grown-up alike-of either White generally or Charlotte's Web in particular will enjoy this biblio-biography. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)