Sweet, Melissa. Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Charlotte’s Web is surely one of the most beloved children’s stories. In a world where evil too often dominates, E.B. White created a world where goodness prevails, a world in which love is stronger than death.Â
Elwyn Brooks White was born in New York in 1899, the youngest of six children. It was a home filled with books and music. An older brother taught him how to read when he was five years old and all six children learned to play musical instruments. While the family lived most of the year in a city, they spent summers on a lake in Maine, where Elwyn started keeping a daily journal. By the time he was in high school, he was writing poems and stories for magazines. He continued writing articles while attending university and when he graduated, he travelled across west across America, sure that writing was the career for him. By 1926, he was a writer for The New Yorker. In 1929, he married Katherine Sergeant Angell, an editor at the magazine, and a year later their son Joel was born. While they lived in New York, their hearts were in Maine and in 1933, they bought a 40-acre farm with a barn. And there was born the setting of Charlotte’s Web.
This biography is smoothly written, full of facts and supplemented with numerous notes, a timeline, a bibliography, and an afterword by E.B. White’s granddaughter, Martha White. But its real brilliance comes from the creative vision of Melissa Sweet. The photographs, the excerpts from White’s writing, and the magnificence of Sweet’s artwork combine to create a wonderful book most highly recommended for anyone who loves children’s literature.Â
