E. B. White as Spiderman

Many casual readers look to books for reasons to read. Admiring a shiny cover, they push in, hungry for truth and beauty. When the sheen proves illusory, they withdraw in disgust or disappointment. But when their needs are met, the book lives inside them, growing and changing as they do, and attaining an almost supernatural status. In choosing and refusing books in this way, these readers exercise a kind of freedom that others, namely critics and researchers housed in universities, can’t always enjoy. Sometimes professional readers have to grit their teeth and persist, pleasure be damned.

Likewise, there are writers who look to books for reasons to write. Michael Sims falls into this category, both because his biography of E. B. White announces itself as The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, and because the very problem of how certain books grow to a status beyond the merely canonical hovers around this biography. Sims’s consideration of White’s life radiates from a cultural and thematic center point—the 1952 children’s novel Charlotte’s Web—following the strands of White’s childhood relationship with animals; his career as an essayist at The New Yorker; his long marriage to Katharine Angell; his admiration for and emulation of James Thurber and Don Marquis; his explorations of animal life at his farm in Maine; and the research he undertook to transmit his fascination with entomology to readers of Charlotte’s Web.

With about thirty pages of notes and references, The Story of Charlotte’s Web will be of interest to scholars researching White’s writing process. Sims’s examination of Cornell University’s E. B. White papers, particularly his attention to White’s notes on spider physiology and behavior, is astute and sometimes surprising. For example, when Sims narrates the composition of Charlotte’s Web as inferred from marginal penciled notations in John Henry Comstock’s The Spider Book and other notes, he makes a convincing case that White approached the writing of his most famous work of fiction as if he were studying for a difficult biology test. Sims describes White’s lists of facts and questions—“Name of spider-Aranea cavatica/ Life span-1 year/ Eggs laid 14 October. When would mating have occurred?/How many eggs? 500. . . .—with lines checked off as his intellectual need was satisfied (175–88). Sims also movingly renders White’s pursuit of beautiful, interesting ideas; he quotes White’s notes about spider flight as reading, “The balloon builder/ Stands on forelegs on a fence post with web streaming out behind in the wind. When ready, he balloons” (184). At times Sims makes his reader believe she’s peering over White’s shoulder as he wonders, studies, and records. Charlotte’s Web captures its readers’ minds, Sims suggests, because White gave his own mind so fully to his research.

This theme-based approach to E. B. White’s long, elliptical life allows Sims room for reflection and analysis other biographers can only dream of. In 1984, Scott Elledge took on the task of chronicling White’s life while the author, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1985, was still alive. Elledge’s E. B. White: A Biography proceeds chronologically and describes nine decades and thousands of pages of writing. Sims, on the other hand, is frank about the selective nature of his biography. He writes, “I invented nothing; to the best of my ability, I misrepresented nothing. But by focusing on particular aspects of his career, such as his interest in natural history and farming, I have produced an account inevitably biased toward this facet of his life” (5). In choosing this approach to White’s life and work, Sims positions himself to answer questions about the personal and intellectual context of Charlotte’s Web that Elledge did not.

Following these aforementioned principles of inclusion, Sims variously discloses that...