Charlotte's Web

On the Arable family farm, a runt pig named Wilbur is saved from slaughter as a piglet only because eight year old Fern Arable begs her father to spare him; sold to her uncle's farm next door, Wilbur later learns he is being fattened for Christmas ham after all, until Charlotte A. Cavatica, a barn spider living above his pen, promises to save him herself. Charlotte spins words into her web overhead, first SOME PIG, then TERRIFIC, then RADIANT, then HUMBLE, convincing the farmer, his family and eventually a crowd at the county fair that Wilbur is a marvel worth keeping alive. Wilbur wins a special award at the fair, guaranteeing his safety, but Charlotte, exhausted from spinning and never built for a long life to begin with, dies there alone soon afterward, having just laid an egg sac that Wilbur carries carefully back to the barn in his mouth. The book ends the following spring with most of Charlotte's five hundred and fourteen children ballooning away on the wind, but three staying behind to live in the doorway where their mother once lived, and Wilbur loving them loyally while never forgetting that no one was ever quite Charlotte.

White writes for children without flinching from what a farm actually is, a place where animals are raised to be eaten and where friendship does not stop that fact so much as sit beside it, and the book earns its warmth by never pretending otherwise. It reads gently and quickly through its first half and turns unmistakably sad by its second, Charlotte's death handled so plainly, in a single understated paragraph, that generations of children have named it their first encounter with loss in a book.

White got the idea after watching a spider build an egg sac on his own farm in Maine in October 1950, and he researched real spider behavior carefully before writing, consulting entomologist Willis J. Gertsch and John Henry Comstock's The Spider Book to get Charlotte's ballooning offspring and her own life cycle right rather than inventing them.