The Story of Charlotte's Web by Michael Sims

The Story of Charlotte's Web by Michael Sims

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 forty-five 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 all-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 imaginary--made him famous around the world.

Michael Sims is the author most recently of In the Womb: Animals (adapted from two National Geographic Channel documentaries); he is also the author of Apollo's Fire: A Journey through the Extraordinary Wonders of an Ordinary Day, which NPR chose as one of the best science books of 2007; Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book; and Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts. For Penguin Classics he also edited The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel and Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief, and he is currently editing The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime. He has written for many periodicals, from the Washington Post to New Statesman.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780802777546
ISBN 10	0802777546
Title	The Story of Charlotte's Web
Author	Michael Sims
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Walker Books
Year published	2011-06-14
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.