Description:

This is the first children’s book by the distinguished author E. B. White. Stuart Little, the hero, is a mouse in the family of Frederick C. Little and is a debonair little character with a shy, engaging manner and a somewhat philosophical turn of mind. He is a great help around the house, and everybody except Snowbell the cat likes him a great deal. In spite of his small size, Stuart gets around in the world, riding a Fifth Avenue bus, racing (and winning in) a sailboat in Central Park, teaching school for a day, and so on. His size -- just over two inches -- does give him some trouble now and then, like the time he was rolled up in the window shade, or when he got dumped into a garbage scow. But on the whole his life is a happy one. His great adventure comes when, at the age of seven, he sets out in the world to seek his dearest friend, Margalo, a beautiful little bird who stayed for a few days in the Littles' Boston fern. It is on this search that we leave Stuart, going north in his little car, sure he is heading in the right direction. In this special gift-book edition of a beloved classic, renowned artist Rosemary Wells has lovingly added delicate watercolor to the original black-and-white drawings by Garth Williams. Stuart Little, small in size only, has the indomitable spirit of a heroic figure, and his story, funny and tender and exciting by turns, will be read, reread, and loved by young and old.

Review

To call Charlotte's Web a children's book about a pig and a spider is like calling a farm a place where food grows. Both statements are true in the narrowest sense, and both entirely miss the thing that makes the place worth visiting. E.B. White's novel is a children's book the way a spider's web is a net: a structure spun patiently from one creature's body, strong enough to hold something heavier than itself, and already, by the time you notice it, a testament to a life that will not last. The book knows exactly what it is doing from its opening sentence about an ax, and what it is doing is teaching a child how to live alongside the knowledge of dying. It does this not by sermonizing but by situating a runt piglet named Wilbur in a manure-scented barn and letting him panic, despair, be comforted, be loved, and still not escape the fact that everything he cares about will eventually go. The miracle is that this is the most comforting book many of its readers will ever find.

The premise is simple to the point of parable: a pig is saved from the ax, then saved from the butcher, by a spider who writes words in her web. But White's method is realist; the grace comes through the floorboards. The manure pile is real. The goose's too-many-goslings-running-over-each-other sentences are real. Templeton's hoard of rotten egg and old string is real. This is the book's central theological wager — that deep attention to the incidental, the overlooked, and the small is itself the only adequate response to mortality. The web doesn't just bear words; it bears the dew of a foggy morning. Lurvy the hired man doesn't just carry slops; he falls on his face, loses his shoe, and chases a pig around a collapsing fence. The book's comedy, and there is plenty of it, functions as the necessary counterweight to the terror. The goose's anarchic coaching during Wilbur's jailbreak — "an hour of freedom is worth a barrel of slops" — is the novel's ethical lodestone in miniature.

The pact the book makes with its reader is struck early and it is brutal. Within two pages an eight-year-old girl named Fern has screamed "do away with it? You mean kill it? Just because it's smaller than the others?" and her father has handed her the ax-handle meant for the runt pig. Wilbur is a living argument against utility, a creature who costs six dollars and who will never be cost-effective. But Fern's "this is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of" is the book's moral ground-floor, and the rest of the story is a kind of patient education in how far that principle can carry you. White doesn't flatter Fern's insight; he just records it. The novel never tells you she is morally correct. It simply allows her to stand, weeping and gripping the ax, in the breakfast-hour kitchen, until her father yields. The book's authority comes from this restraint. When, many chapters later, the oldest sheep delivers the news of Wilbur's impending slaughter with the flatness of an abattoir accountant — "the family have been fattening you up because they intend to kill you" — the echo of the first-chapter ax lands with the force of genre-collapse. The pastoral has been a machine all along.

Charlotte A. Cavatica enters as darkness and voice. "Do you want a friend, Wilbur?" spoken from the doorframe at the end of Chapter 4, is a resurrection moment that White earns through forty-odd pages of Wilbur's earnest, pathetic loneliness. The spider is near-sighted, beautiful, calm, predatory, and formally unsentimental. Her pedagogy is the book's pedagogy: she doesn't reassure Wilbur with abstractions. "I will not let you die." She picks up the problem and goes to work. The chapter "Charlotte" contains the book's most unflinching moral education, and it arrives not as a fable but as lunch. When Charlotte wraps and drinks a fly, Wilbur is horrified; she responds not with apology but natural history. "It is not a bad pitch, on the whole." The spider trade is trapping, and trapping is killing, and killing is right because it feeds her children and keeps the world balanced. White's genius here is to anticipate the reader's own attempt to sort the barn into moral binaries — Wilbur is good, Templeton is bad, the spider is good after all — and quietly dissolve the activity of sorting. Charlotte is both a deeply good friend and a cheerful killer of flies. There is no oxymoron for the natural world; the categories are for humans, and the humans in this book, however gentle, are the ones with the axes.

The plot mechanics of the web-words — "SOME PIG," "TERRIFIC," "RADIANT," and "HUMBLE" — have the structure of miracle, the method of a rural advertising campaign, and the substance of a character's deepest insecurity or gift. Which is another way of saying that White moves the plot through the humility of the pig. Wilbur is not, in his own understanding, "some pig"; he is a runt, terrified of knives and bad dreams, riddled with useless love for a spider. But the words work. The minister sees them and counsels that humans should stay humble about miracles. The Zuckermans begin treating their livestock as special because the words tell them they should, and the novel's point, which is achieved through ear rather than argument, is that this is not naivety. It's the whole mechanism of love. You treat someone as valuable and they become valuable; you love something and it stops being the runt. White is not cynical about the simplicity here, and he's right not to be. The mechanism is the point. "You are a famous pig and you are a good pig."

But the book's spine is its seasonal arc — spring piglet, summer friendship, autumn miracle, winter vigil, spring hatching — and seasons mean death. The cricket chapter, less read than the web miracles that bracket it, is the hinge. The crickets sing "summer is over and gone," and Wilbur practices looking radiant while Charlotte is already weary. The language registers the temperature change, the light change, the page-by-page darkening of the barn. The Fair sequences extend this: the rival pig Uncle, who already wears the blue first-prize ribbon, is just another pig. He tells bad jokes. He's bigger. Charlotte dismisses him. The prize doesn't mark superiority; it marks what the judges see, and the judges are easily impressed. The novel's world is one in which everybody is judged, eventually — Wilbur in the ring, the flies in Charlotte's larder — and the only meaningful defense is to have been a good friend.

Templeton is the book's most durable theological problem, which is probably why he is more interesting than the sheep. He's greedy, unpleasant, hoarding, and absolutely necessary. The rotten goose egg he's been saving detonates at the exact moment Avery tries to swat Charlotte with a stick, driving the boy from the barn and giving the novel its funniest, stinkiest salvation. "It pays to save things," Templeton croaks, and he's repulsive and he's right. The rat retrieves the words from the dump: "crunchy" and "preshrunk" before "radiant" is settled on. He has to be bribed with Wilbur's future slops to retrieve the egg sac. He's the price the beautiful friendship pays to exist. That White permits him to survive, unrepentant and well-fed, is one of the book's quietest, hardest truths: the world contains Templetons, and they do necessary work, and nobody needs to be redeemed in the end to be part of the story.

Fern's arc, the one that most closely tracks the book's reader, is the most painful because it registers as loss even under the soft handling. She saves Wilbur, visits him daily, hears the animals talk and reports their conversations to her increasingly alarmed parents, and then, at the County Fair, she goes off with Henry Fussy and leaves Wilbur with the rest of the livestock. Dr. Dorian's counsel to Mrs. Arable — that a spider's web is itself a miracle, that children's attention is sharper than adults', and that Fern's love of animals is harmless — gives the book permission to let Fern grow up without punishing her for it. White offers no farewell scene between Fern and Wilbur. The drift is too natural for a formal goodbye. The reader is left to notice, sometime in the final chapters, that Fern hasn't been around much, and that Wilbur has other concerns, and that growing up means attention shifting to Ferris wheels and boys and away from the speech of the sheep. The novel doesn't judge this; it simply records it, and the recording is in the tradition of the seasons it's been teaching you to read all along. Fern's time in the barn cellar was always one chapter in a larger life.

The death of Charlotte, when it comes, has the formal quality of a departure time from a train schedule. She announces she is "languishing." She will not live to see the egg sac hatch. "What's a life, anyway?" she says, and that question, in the context of a children's book, should be unthinkably adult, but White has built a theological architecture sturdy enough to bear it. Charlotte's answer — "we're born, we live a little while, we die" — is not a lament. It's a definition of terms before she clarifies that "by helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle." The verb is precise: lift up, not justify, not sanctify. The felt need, in a book this attentive to the small, is to make life slightly better than the mindless cycle of trapping and eating. Friendship, for Charlotte, is the thing that lifts the trap slightly toward meaning. She asks nothing back except that Wilbur carry her egg sac home. The spider's work is two-part — web-words and the peach-colored sac — and the first saves Wilbur's body while the second continues her lineage. White allows Wilbur to deliver a formal memorial years later, the beautiful speech to Joy, Aranea, and Nellie pledging "friendship, forever and ever," and the final sentence — "it is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both" — is epigraph, epitaph, and benediction. The gut-punch, which White delivers without sentiment, is that Charlotte dies utterly alone in a fairground pen, waving one leg toward a Wilbur who cannot see.

The book's realism, the literary tradition it selectively inhabits, is the realism of the American barn, not the American living room. White is a fastidious reporter of nature, and the natural descriptions — a spider's seven-part leg, the way a gosling falls from egg to world, the buttermilk bath that whitens Wilbur's spring-pig skin, the gossamer balloons of departing spiderlings — are rendered in the plain style of a writer who knows his field guides. But what makes the book more than a masterclass in rural observation is its placement in the canon of works about death and mortality offered directly to children. The best gloss on Charlotte's Web in the cross-references is Charlotte's own line: the Queensborough Bridge took men eight years to build, whereas she can finish a web in an evening. The line works as structure and as aesthetic manifesto. The book's great labor — the weaving of a story that can bear a child's weight — is rendered seemingly overnight, the long development of craft wholly hidden in the final shape. The bridgefoot reference to human engineering is Charlotte's only clue to a wider world; the novel otherwise stays inside its small kingdom, and finds that kingdom almost impossibly large.

The material the book cannot quite talk about, because of the limits of its own time and form, is what kind of friend Charlotte can't be — the fact that a spider's span is a season, that temperaments like the goose's and Templeton's are given no intimate weight, that Fern's drift toward conventional girlhood receives perhaps too easy an assent from Dr. Dorian, whose benevolence stands in for the harder question of whether the child was right to hear the animals in the first place. These empty spaces aren't failures so much as cost-of-doing-business; White is telling a compact death-and-spring story, and the missing pieces would belong to a different book, a longer book, a book maybe unable to talk with such directness to the eight-year-old waking at night thinking about what it means to not exist. The book's craft is a craft of exclusion. The manure smell and the milk-fed pig and the rat's hoard are all exactly what they need to be. The book earns the mercy of the ending because it never cheats on the hardness of the facts. The same spider that makes the words dies. There is no reprieve for spiders.

This is a book for a specific reader at a specific time: the child aged roughly eight to twelve who is ready to begin understanding death as permanent and love as mortal, who needs to hear that growing up and away from the barn doorway happens, and isn't wrong, and leaves things behind, and is still survivable. It is for any reader of any age who has been small, and who has been loved by someone who would not be able to stay. The books that last are the ones that perform on the page exactly what they preach, and the closing line — that Charlotte was both a true friend and a good writer — is an unobtrusive craft-marker. E.B. White is offering a template for how to write a book that does not condescend to children about death, and the template involves manure, jokes, the correct length of a spider's life cycle, and a refusal to look away from the ax in the first paragraph. There is no higher praise for a children's book, and no more accurate one.

Notable Quotes

The pig couldn't help being born small, could it? If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?

Eight-year-old Fern confronts her father as he heads to the hoghouse with an ax to kill the runt of the litter. — justice, moral reasoning, childhood innocence, value of life

I see no difference. This is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.

Fern refuses to accept her father's distinction between a little girl and a runty pig, insisting on the universal right to life. — justice, equality, moral clarity

I'm less than two months old and I'm tired of living.

Wilbur, alone in his pen at Zuckerman's farm with no friends and nothing to do, sinks into existential despair. — loneliness, despair, meaning

Do you want a friend, Wilbur? I'll be a friend to you. I've watched you all day and I like you.

Charlotte's voice comes out of the darkness of the barn on Wilbur's loneliest night, offering friendship before he even knows what she is. — friendship, kindness, connection

A spider has to pick up a living somehow or other, and I happen to be a trapper. I just naturally build a web and trap flies and other insects.

Charlotte explains her predatory nature to a horrified Wilbur, neither apologizing for nor glorifying what she is. — nature, acceptance, survival, honesty

An hour of freedom is worth a barrel of slops.

The goose urges Wilbur not to return to his pen after escaping, but Wilbur chooses the comfort of warm slops over uncertain liberty. — freedom, security, choice

I don't want to die. I want to stay alive, right here in my comfortable manure pile with all my friends. I want to breathe the beautiful air and lie in the beautiful sun.

Wilbur's anguished plea after the old sheep tells him he is being fattened for slaughter at Christmas. — mortality, love of life, fear

You shall not die.

Charlotte's simple, absolute promise to save Wilbur's life, made without any plan yet in mind. — loyalty, determination, friendship, courage

Never hurry and never worry!

Charlotte's prescription for Wilbur's wellbeing as she works on her plan to save him. — patience, wisdom, care

People are not as smart as bugs.

Charlotte reasons that if she can fool insects into her web, she can certainly fool humans with words woven into it. — intelligence, deception, human nature

People believe almost anything they see in print.

Charlotte explains to the barnyard animals why writing words in her web will change how humans see Wilbur. — media, persuasion, credulity, language

Oh, no. I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.

Dr. Dorian responds to Mrs. Arable's questions about the writing in the web, redirecting wonder toward the natural world. — wonder, nature, miracles, attention

Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more.

Dr. Dorian's gentle response when asked whether he believes animals can talk, as Fern claims. — listening, attention, humility, communication

You're terrific as far as I'm concerned, and that's what counts. You're my best friend, and I think you're sensational.

Charlotte reassures Wilbur after he protests that he isn't really terrific, affirming that friendship defines worth. — friendship, self-worth, love, perception

If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something — even though it's just a very little bit of something.

Wilbur's surprisingly philosophical reply when a lamb dismisses him as meaning 'less than nothing.' — philosophy, value, existence, dignity

Sleep, sleep, my love, my only, Deep, deep, in the dung and the dark; Be not afraid and be not lonely! This is the hour when frogs and thrushes Praise the world from the woods and the rushes. Rest from care, my one and only, Deep in the dung and the dark!

Charlotte sings a lullaby to Wilbur as the barn grows dark, combining maternal tenderness with the earthy reality of his life. — comfort, lullaby, nature, care, beauty in humble places

Children pay better attention than grownups. If Fern says that the animals in Zuckerman's barn talk, I'm quite ready to believe her.

Dr. Dorian defends Fern's claims about talking animals to her worried mother. — childhood, attention, wonder, belief

Who wants to live forever? I am naturally a heavy eater and I get untold satisfaction from the pleasures of the feast.

Templeton dismisses the old sheep's warning that he would live longer if he ate less. — appetite, mortality, hedonism, self-knowledge

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

Charlotte's farewell to Wilbur at the Fair, explaining why she saved his life — the book's emotional and philosophical center. — friendship, meaning, mortality, selflessness, purpose

These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days...

Charlotte describes the future Wilbur will have because of her sacrifice, a passage that is both prophecy and elegy. — mortality, seasons, beauty, sacrifice, the gift of life

No one was with her when she died.

The narrator's simple statement of Charlotte's death at the deserted Fair Grounds, after everyone else has gone home. — death, solitude, sacrifice, grief

It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

The novel's penultimate reflection on Wilbur's life in the barn, a catalogue of ordinary wonders. — gratitude, contentment, beauty, home, the glory of the ordinary

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

The novel's famous final lines, an epitaph for Charlotte that equates friendship and artistry as the highest callings. — friendship, writing, legacy, tribute

She was in a class by herself.

The narrator's judgment of Charlotte, noting that while Wilbur loved her descendants, none ever replaced her. — uniqueness, friendship, irreplaceability, loss

Wilbur was merely suffering the doubts and fears that often go with finding a new friend.

After Wilbur's initial horror at Charlotte's bloodthirsty nature, the narrator gently explains his discomfort. — friendship, trust, acceptance, vulnerability