The following blog entry was written by Sarah Solomon, an intern here at READ.

Just about everyone knows of the fabled tale of Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the Spider. The author of this book, Charlotte's Web, was none other than the American author E. B. White, whose birthday was July 11.

Born in 1899 in Mount Vernon, New York, Elwyn Brooks attended Cornell University. It was a tradition at this school that anyone with the last name White would be nicknamed Andy, because one of the co-founders of the school was named Andrew Dickson White. So Andy it was. However, in all his professional writings, he used the name E. B. White.

Though he started writing in publications such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, he soon turned to writing children's literature. His first novel, in 1945, was Stuart Little, a tale of a boy from New York. He described that the boy exhibited a "shy, pleasant manner of a mouse", and since the illustrations portrayed the boy as a mouse, this is the image most associated with this novel’s protagonist. (This book has a short ending – why? Because White was a hypochondriac and thought he was going to die before the book was finished. Turns out he died 40 years after the book was published!)

His next novel was Charlotte's Web, written in 1952. If you aren't familiar with the story, Wilbur, a runt pig who is saved by a girl named Fern, is sent to live in a barn where he does not know anyone or any animals. Charlotte is a spider who reaches out to Wilbur, and the two maintain a strong friendship throughout the novel.

E. B. White's third children's novel is Trumpet of the Swan, which tells the story of a poor swan who has no voice, and therefore learns how to play the trumpet.

Notice a pattern?

Why is it that a lot of children's literature revolves around animals? One explanation is that human adults are tangled and complicated and wrapped up in various social, economical, mental, and emotional webs (no pun intended). Children, on the other hand have not yet succumbed to those adult complications. And animals, unlike humans, live simple, carefree lives of simply doing what it takes to survive. (Not that surviving Thanksgiving and Christmas is slightly worrisome for some farm animals). The relative simplicity of animals is attractive and conducive to children's ways of thinking.

Or, another possibility is that the idea of animals making friends and talking to one another is simply cute and entertaining.

Either way, E. B. White's novels have obviously resounded with children, and are still read and referenced today. So happy birthday, E. B. White, and thanks for giving us eager beavers the bees' knees of children's writing.