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"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." Those are the concluding sentences of E.B. White's Newberry Award-winning, much-beloved children's novel, Charlotte's Web. Their unobtrusive perfection exemplifies the writerly virtues that White and his coauthor, William Strunk, taught in The Elements of Style. Even so, at first glance, the enduring fame of White's books for children seems incongruous. After all, White was best known to several generations of readers as The New Yorker's most winsome essayist. A Cornell alum, he had begun writing for the self-consciously urbane magazine in 1925—his first piece was a lighthearted satire about a copywriter's gearing up for a spring ad campaign—and no one was more influential shaping its tone and outlook than White, who, among other things, oversaw the "Talk of the Town Section," wrote taglines for many of the heralded New Yorker cartoons, and contributed innumerable essays and poems to the magazine over the years.

White would continue to write for The New Yorker for the rest of his life, but in 1938 he made two moves: he started contributing regularly to Harper's, placing 55 essays there between 1938 and 1943 (at which point he resumed more-or-less-full-time writing for The New Yorker); and he left Manhattan for a farm in Maine. And it was on the farm that he took up children's writing. Stuart Little, the story of a mouse born to human parents, was published in 1945. Four years later, White began Charlotte's Web.

The outlines of the story are fairly simple: Fern Arable is an eight-year-old farm girl whose daddy raises pigs. One day, a new litter of piglets arrives, all perfect and pink and healthy except for one, who is small and weak. Papa Arable, sensible man that he is, prepares to kill the runt, but Fern begs that Papa spare the piglet's life. (Opponents of Peter Singer might want to note Fern's speech: "The pig couldn't help being born small, could it?" she demands. "If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me? … This is the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.") Papa relents. If she is willing to care for the piglet, he can live. Fern, rejoicing, christens him Wilbur.

That might have been, actually, the end of the book. The story thus far has all the components that middle-school English teachers demand: introduction, rising tension, climax, dénouement. But of course Fern and Wilbur's story constitutes only the first two chapters of the novel. In fact, Fern's opening scene didn't appear in White's first drafts. He had a very hard time coming up with a good beginning to the book. In one version, the novel started with Charlotte the spider. In another draft, White led with Wilbur, a "small, nicely-behaved pig living in a manure pile in the cellar of a barn." A third draft opened with a poetic ode to life in the barn. A fourth version began with the farmer walking out to the hoghouse at midnight, counting the litter of newborn pigs. Only after many such false starts did White latch onto Fern—and one of the best opening lines in American fiction: "Where's Papa going with that ax?"

But no matter how long it took White to nail the beginning of Charlotte's Web, the narrative arc of those first two Fern-and-Wilbur chapters is crucial to the book. The opening scene encapsulates in miniature the action at the heart of the novel: the threat to Wilbur's life and his rescue by a loving female.

So Fern gets to keep Wilbur. Under her tender nurture, he grows into a fine, big pig—and Papa Arable, seeing that Fern can no longer adequately take care of him, insists she deliver Wilbur to the Zuckermans' farm. Once there, Wilbur learns the horrifying news that he is being fattened up because the Zuckermans plan to slaughter him. Wilbur panics. He doesn't want to die. He wants somebody to save him. And somebody does: a spider named Charlotte A. Cavatica. (Araneus cavaticus is the Latin name for the common barn spider. The spiders in the Araneidae family spin the orb-shaped webs you see on posters at Halloween time.)

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