Charlotte's Web

Background

Charlotte’s Web was written by E. B. White, beloved author of two other books for youth—Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan. Adult readers probably know White best for his humorous essays in The New Yorker magazine, where he wrote for nearly six decades until his death in 1985. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977 for his whole body of work. President John F. Kennedy also recognized White’s writing with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

Born in Mt. Vernon, New York in 1899, Elwyn Brooks White grew up with a love of words, keeping a journal and writing for his high school newspaper. He attended Cornell University beginning in 1917, where he studied journalism and became the editor-in-chief of The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper. At Cornell, Elwyn White received the nickname that he would carry for the rest of the life; tradition held that any Cornell student with the surname White would be called “Andy” after the school’s founder, Andrew Dickson White.

White began writing for The New Yorker not long after its conception in 1925; he became a staff writer in 1927, and his work helped mold the magazine’s unique tone and style. He originated the “Notes and Comments” section of “Talk of the Town,” which distills the week’s news into short articles that each read like a sound bite from a dinner conversation. In 1928, he married Katherine Angell, the magazine’s managing editor and the woman originally responsible for hiring him. The Whites were married for nearly fifty years, until Katherine’s death in 1977. They made their home both in New York City and in Maine and had one son together.

White published his first book for children, Stuart Little, in 1945. While critics panned it, it became a bestseller and has remained a popular children’s book today. Charlotte’s Web followed in 1952 and made an even bigger splash. His third children’s book, The Trumpet of the Swan was published in 1970; that same year White won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his work. E. B. White’s other book-length claim to fame is his publication of The Elements of Style, the seminal style guide for American writers, often known simply as “Strunk & White” after its authors’ surnames. William Strunk, Jr. was one of White’s professors at Cornell; in his classes Strunk utilized a privately-published little book on style written by Strunk himself. In the 1950’s White revisited this guide to simple, pared-down rhetoric, adding some content and editing the book for distribution to a wider audience. The first public edition sold two million copies, and sales of the fourth edition (1999) and The Elements of Style Illustrated (2005) remain brisk today.

• The initials “E.B.” are short for Elwyn Brooks, though throughout his adult life White was known to friends and family as “Andy.”
• With his colleague James Thurber from The New Yorker, White co-wrote Is Sex Necessary?, a humorous skewering of then-popular books on Freudian psychology.
• From 1938-1943, White wrote a column entitled “One Man’s Meat” for Harper’s Magazine in addition to his varied workload at The New Yorker.
• Charlotte’s Web was made into an animated film in 1973; the role of Charlotte was voiced by the actress Debbie Reynolds (Singin’ in the Rain, The Unsinkable Molly Brown).