From Farm to Screen:
E.B. White’s Pastoral World

Elwyn Brooks “E. B.” White (1899-1985), Cornell ’21, was an essayist, humorist and poet, well known for his contributions to The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, as well as for being co-author/editor of the best-selling writing guide The Elements of Style. But his most beloved works are his books for children: Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, which are considered classics of children’s literature. Charlotte’s Web, in particular, is often cited as one of the best American children’s books of the 20^th century. Its popularity with readers continues over 50 years after its first publication.

White was an animal lover - and owner - all his life. As a child he kept “pigeons, dogs, snakes, pollywogs, turtles, rabbits, lizards, singing birds, chameleons, caterpillars, and mice.” This love and fascination would manifest itself in the respect he accorded his animal characters. His realistic depictions of the behaviors and physicality of his subjects is one of the elements that have given his novels such lasting appeal. In his balance between fantasy and reality, animals may talk, but “it is indeed a spider who talks, indeed a pig. It is not a woman in spider’s clothing, or a boy in a pig’s skin.”

Inspired by a dream of a mouse-like person, who “was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing,” White first started jotting down stories about his character in the 1930s, using them to entertain his nieces and nephews. Those stories eventually became the foundation for Stuart Little, published in 1945. White had a lifelong fascination with mice: at age nine, he wrote a poem about a mouse which won a prize from Women’s Home Companion and became his first published work. Mice continued to appear frequently in his poetry and prose throughout his career. After the publication of Stuart Little, White would repeatedly insist that Stuart is not an actual mouse; he is “a small guy who looks very much like a mouse… He is a second son.” This premise is established in the first paragraph, but is not consistently maintained: several times throughout the novel White refers to him as a mouse. Certainly he’s no ordinary mouse, any more than he is an ordinary boy: within a few days of his birth, he is essentially a tiny adult, wearing a suit and fedora and carrying a cane.

As the first children’s book from an already well-established author, Stuart Little was highly anticipated and mostly well received. One notable exception was the famously negative review from Anne Carol Moore, an influential children’s librarian at the New York Public Library. One of her complaints was that the first line states that Stuart was “born” to a human mother. Other critics also noted the “monstrosity” of the idea, and in subsequent editions the word was changed to “arrived.” Children, however, have rarely taken issue with the concept, and continue to embrace Stuart as the delightful make-believe creature he was intended to be.

The popular film adaptation of Stuart Little (Columbia Pictures, 1999) made a significant change to the story’s premise that would have pleased those early discomfited critics of the book: Stuart is portrayed as an actual mouse (although a very human-like one) that is adopted by the Little family. He still acquires a toy car, but does not take the indefinite road trip featured in the novel.

Although White grew up in Mt. Vernon, a suburban “village” just outside New York City, he cultivated a love of rural life that was finally realized when he and his wife Katharine purchased a farm on the coast of Allen Cove in Brooklin, Maine. His observations of the pigs, geese, sheep and other livestock he kept informed his depictions of the characters in Charlotte’s Web.

Many readers suspect that the event described in this essay - the illness and death of a pig White was raising for slaughter, and the ironic attachment he developed towards it as he tried to nurse it back to health - provided an inspiration for Charlotte’s Web. Although White denied any direct connection, he did cite his conflicting feelings on the general practice of raising livestock to be “murdered by their benefactors” as a possible catalyst: “I have kept several pigs, starting them in the spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through the summer and fall. The relationship bothered me. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. . . Anyway, the theme of Charlotte’s Web is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect” (”Pigs, and Spiders,” McClurg’s Book News, January 1953).

White did a great deal of research on the anatomy and behavior of spiders, and even sent books on the subject to illustrator Garth Williams to ensure that Charlotte would look like an actual Araneus cavaticus (barn spider). Here he sketched an image of Charlotte above an early draft of the first chapter. He modeled his sketch of “Zuckerman’s Barn” after his own farm in Brooklin, Maine, which he and his wife Katharine had purchased in 1933. In the finished novel, the barn and the surrounding farm become characters themselves. White liberally infuses the text with lush descriptions of its sights, sounds, smells, and the stately progress of the seasons, giving the farm an idyllic quality that reflects his own love of nature and the rural lifestyle.

White spent two summers before and after his senior year at Cornell working as a counselor in this Ontario summer camp. He revisited it several times over the course of his life, eventually becoming an investor. Many of the descriptions of Sam and Louis’s adventures at Camp Kookooskoos in Stuart Little are based on his experiences there.

White’s tale of a wild trumpeter swan born without a voice is distinctly different in style from his earlier books, but like all of his writing it celebrates his love of wildlife and the outdoors. Louis overcomes his disability by befriending an animal-loving boy named Sam and learning to play a trumpet. White acknowledged that he had never seen a trumpeter swan in person, but his research is evident in his descriptions of their nesting habits, migration patterns, and distinctive “Ko-hoh!” call.

Administered by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children. White was awarded the medal in 1970.

The impressive number of translations of White’s novels available is a testament to the popularity of his characters and the universality of their appeal.