Charlotte's Web

A runt pig is born on a Maine farm in spring, and Fern Arable, eight years old, talks her father out of the axe. She bottle-feeds him, names him Wilbur, and sells him to her uncle Homer Zuckerman for six dollars when he outgrows the kitchen. In the Zuckerman barn he meets the animals who will share his year: a goose, a rat named Templeton, a sheep, and a gray barn spider in the doorway above his pen. When the sheep tells Wilbur plainly what happens to pigs at Christmas, Charlotte A. Cavatica answers with a plan. She writes words in her web, Some Pig first, then Terrific, Radiant, and Humble, and the county reads them as a verdict. Wilbur goes to the fair, wins a prize he did not earn, and comes home. Charlotte does not.

The 192 pages move through a full year, spring to winter, and White keeps the calendar visible: the goslings hatch, the hay comes in, the fairground fills in September, the first frost arrives. Garth Williams drew 47 illustrations for the first edition, and his spiders and pigs have followed the book through every reissue since. Publishers Weekly named it the best-selling children's paperback of all time in 2000, a figure that reflects school orders more than bookstore sales.

White wrote it aloud to himself before typing, and the prose carries that habit. The rope swing chapter in the hayloft, where sentences stretch and shorten with the arc of the swing, gets taught in writing classes more often than any other passage in children's literature. The book handles death directly. Charlotte dies alone at the fairground after laying her egg sac, and Wilbur carries the sac home in his mouth. The three of her 514 children who stay in the barn become his friends, and the other 511 leave on the wind. [edit]