Essay
Some Book
Celebrating 60 Years of ‘Charlotte’s Web’
By MICHAEL SIMS
Published: April 20, 2012
I knew of several barns where I thought the past might lie.
Illustration by Garth Williams from ‘Charlotte’s Web.’ Copyright renewed 1980 by estate of Garth Williams.
— E. B. White
The barn was very large. It was very old. For more than a century before E. B. White and his wife, Katharine, purchased the farm in 1933, the barn had stood on a rise above Allen Cove, Me., near the village of North Brooklin. For White, the barn was the center of their 40 acres, even more so than the big white house that was attached to it by an aromatic woodshed. The building united White’s two great writerly loves — barnyard animals and Maine. During his long career he wrote about everything from the predictability of radio preachers to the emotional fallout from nuclear dread, but he meditated upon farm animals and Maine life with particular affection.
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