I saw this book on the shelf at our local library and thought it might be interesting. There are so many books I pick up, read a bit, and return to the library without finishing--or reviewing. This was a lovely find.Sims writes about White's boyhood years, his early years in New York, his work for The New Yorker, and his life on his farm in Maine. He said at one point that White liked to think of himself as a "gentleman writer" not a "gentleman farmer." Charlotte's Web is such a beloved book of childhood. White put great energy and time into details of accuracy and wording. Garth Williams did the same for the illustrations.I am eager to read the book with my grandsons--hoping I will be the first to share it with them. Sims tells us that it is really impossible to write a biography that is not, as E.B. White says, a matter of interpretation. Sims does not invent dialogue and he has clearly done plenty of research into the life of his subject, but because he emphasizes areas of White's life, i.e. his love of nature and the rural life, he knows that he has interpreted and thus created a slant. The book is wonderful, however, exploring young Elwyn's early life, his shyness and fears, his total comfort in the natural world, his later nostalgia for summers at a Maine lake, and for his family's stables. Sims builds the character of White carefully and sensitively, as he builds towards the ultimate point of his book: how Charlotte's Web came to be. Readers who, like me, read Charlotte's Web as a child, saw the Debbie Reynolds movie, read it to their kids, will get so much more out of another reading having benefited from Sims' astonishing biography of this astonishing man. The only puzzle I find is why Sims neglects to mention White's Newbery honor for Charlotte, as he describes all of the literary fanfare that the book received upon its publication in 1952. Unforgettable tidbits offered along the way are Garth Williams and his road to fame that began with Stuart Little; the fact that King George VI counted Stuart Little among his favorite books; and a marvelous quotation from a letter White once wrote to a college student about writing really being a translation, and the opus to be translated is oneself. Children's librarians will be amused by Anne Carroll Moore's attacks on White, as well. This book is a rich and intriguing read not only about a fascinating person, but about the New Yorker, the great Katharine Angell, and a time long past. The immensely detailed account of White's studies of spiders and his many starts and stops in preparation for his book is an absolutely perfect glimpse into a writer's mind and the process of writing.
What do You think about Story Of Charlottes Web (2012)?
Biography of E.B. White, of the greatly admired children's books and New Yorker essays.
—lola
Not great writing, but the life of E.B. White is so charming I found myself captivated.
—sophie8798
It was really nice and touching story at the end I love the story and movie
—ladyjay1970
its a very emotional movie (well... for me it is)
—borg
