As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats, White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. Painfully shy his entire life, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It is all the more impressive,...

When the Little family adopts an adorably spunky boy named Stuart, who looks like a mouse, the older son is not sure about have a mouse as a brother, while the family cat plots to dispose of Stuart.

Wilbur the pig and his farmyard friends learn much about friendship from Charlotte, a small spider.

In ordinary Somerset County, a young farm girl named Fern rescues the runt of a litter of pigs from her father's ax. Fern names the pig Wilbur, takes care of him, and continues to visit him every day after he is moved to her Uncle Homer Zuckerman's barn across the road. But it's Wilbur's friendship with Charlotte the spider that ultimately saves him from the "smoke house" when Charlotte's talent for weaving praiseworthy words about Wilbur into her...