Sixty years ago, the book Charlotte’s Web first appeared in print. This children’s classic is often seen as a story of a spider and a pig. But when E.B. White recorded a narration of the book, he said something different: “This is a story of the barn. I wrote it for children, and to amuse myself.”
And the way he describes it, Homer Zuckerman’s barn is a character with its own, complex personality — smelling of hay and manure, of grain and axle grease and new boots and fish heads for the barn cats, but mostly hay, which was a familiar smell to White. He grew up in a New York City suburb at a time when people rode horses and carriages, and his parents had a stable.
“His favorite thing was to care for animals,” says author Michael Sims. “Chickens, ducks, mice, dogs of course.” Sims is the author of The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic.
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