by Michael Sims
235 Roger’s ten-year-old daughter: Roger Angell, “Andy,” NY, 14 February 2005.
CODA: AFTER CHARLOTTE
236 treated Ursula Nordstrom to a grand lunch: and quotations in paragraph: Nordstrom, letter to Meindert DeJong, 4 March 1953, Nordstrom, pp. 63–64.
237 affectionate nicknames: Nordstrom, p. xix.
237 more comfortable drawing animals than people: William Anderson, “Garth Williams after Eighty,” The Horn Book, March/April 1993.
237 denounced as “integrationist propaganda”: Unsigned Associated Press story, Los Angeles Evening Mirror News, 22 May 1959.
238 his original drawing for the cover: Michael Cavna, “ ‘Charlotte’s Web’ Cover Art Snares $155K at Auction,” Washington Post, 16 October 2010.
238 tweed suit and Ferragamo pumps: Nan Robertson, “Life without Katharine: E. B. White and His Sense of Loss,” New York Times, 4 April 1980.
239 “I am very sad”: John Updike, letter to KSW, 27 December 1959, quoted in Davis, p. 180.
239 “I must say … she looks”: EBW, letter to Morris Bishop [2 January 1961], in Letters.
239 emergency appendectomy: Davis, p. 191.
239 talked to the New York Times: Nan Robertson, “Life without Katharine: E. B. White and His Sense of Loss,” New York Times, 4 April 1980.
240 Andy gave Louis’s father: EBW, The Trumpet of the Swan, ch. 4.
240 Nordstrom suggested … collected letters: Nordstrom, p. 363, n. 1.
240 Andy loaded a canoe: Roger Angell, “Andy,” NY, 14 February 2005.
241 managed medical care for his father: Ibid.
241 “You did, Dad” and “Not bad”: Ibid.
242 a yellow school bus: All information in this scene comes from Mary and Robert Gallant, in interviews with the author, July 2009 and December 2010.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
This bibliography comprises all books cited within the text or the notes to the book, as well as others useful for the student or general reader interested in E. B. White. It omits articles that are cited only once or twice in the notes, unless they have special significance.
BOOKS BY E. B. WHITE
Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952.
The Elements of Style, New York: Macmillan, 1959 (Based upon Strunk’s privately printed 1919 edition.) by William Strunk Jr., and E. B. White.
Every Day Is Saturday. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934.
The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938.
Here Is New York. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949.
Introduction, The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950.
Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel the Way You Do, by James Thurber and E. B. White. New York: Harper, 1929.
The Lady Is Cold. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929.
Letters of E. B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Revised edition, edited by Martha White. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
One Man’s Meat. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942.
Poems and Sketches of E. B. White. New York: HarperCollins, 1983.
The Points of My Compass. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Quo Vadimus? or, The Case for the Bicycle. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939.
The Second Tree from the Corner. New York: Harper & Row, 1954.
Stuart Little. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945.
A Subtreasury of American Humor, coedited with Katharine S. White. New York: Coward-McCann, 1941.
The Trumpet of the Swan. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
The Wild Flag: Editorials from The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.
Writings from The New Yorker, 1927–1976, edited by Rebecca M. Dale. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
OTHER SOURCES
Adney, Tappan. “Milicete Indian natural history.” Abstract of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York 5 (1892–93).
Anderson, A. J. E. E. B. White: A Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1978.
Angell, Roger. Let Me Finish. New York: Harcourt, 2006. See especially his essay “Andy.”
Aron, Cindy S. Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Ashley, Sally. F.P.A.: The Life and Times of Franklin Pierce Adams. New York: Beaufort, 1986.
Batteiger, John. Marquis bibliographer and host of http://donmarquis.com.
Bernstein, Burton. Thurber: A Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.
Blother, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. University Press of Mississippi, 1974.
Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1974.
Brunetta, Leslie, and Catherine L. Craig. Spider Silk. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Burroughs, John. Wake-Robin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
_____. “Real and Sham Natural History,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1903.
_____. Time and Change. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. See especially “The Gospel of Nature.”
Comstock, John Henry. The Spider Book: A Manual for the Study of the Spiders … Revised and edited by W. J. Gertsch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948. (Originally published in 1912.) This was one of White’s three major technical sources for information about spiders.
Davis, Linda H. Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Elledge, Scott. E. B. White: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1984.
Epstein, Joseph. “E. B. White, Dark and Lite.” Commentary, April 1986. Reprinted in Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Forbes, Peter. The Gecko’s Foot: Bio-Engineering New Materials from Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Gannon, Susan R., Suzanne Rahn, and Ruth Anne Thompson. St. Nicholas and Mary Mapes Dodge: The Legacy of a Children’s Magazine. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004.
Gertsch, Willis J. American Spiders. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1949.
Gill, Brendan. Here at The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1975.
Grant, Jane. Ross, The New Yorker and Me. New York: Reynal/William Morrow, 1968.
Hall, Katharine Romans. E. B. White: A Bibliographic Catalogue of Printed Materials in the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library. New York: Garland, 1979.
Hearn, Michael Patrick. The Annotated Wizard of Oz. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Hillyard, Paul. The Book of the Spider: From Arachnophobia to the Love of Spiders. New York: Random House, 1994.
Holmes, Charles S. The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
Kahn, E. J. About The New Yorker and Me. New York: Putnam, 1979.
Kammen, Michael G. A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Kramer, Dale. Ross and The New Yorker. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1951.
Kunkel, Thomas. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1995.
Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Levin, Betty. “The Universe and Old Macdonald.” In Innocence and Experience: Essays and Conversations on Children’s Literature, edited by Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987.
Long, William J. A Little Brother to the Bear. Lexington, MA: Ginn and Company, 1903. Reprint, Chapel Hill, NC: Yesterday’s Classics, 2006.
Long, William J. Ways of Wood Folk.
Lutts, Ralph H. “John Burroughs and the Honey Bee: Bridging Science and Emotion in Environmental Writing.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3, no. 2, pp. 85–100.
Lutts, Ralph H. The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, & Sentiment. Univer
sity Press of Virginia, 1990.
Maiken Peter T. Night Trains: The Pullman System in the Golden Years of American Rail Travel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992.
Mankoff, Robert, editor. The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2004.
Marcus, Leonard S. Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Marquis, Don. Archy and Mehitabel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927.
_____. Archy’s Life of Mehitabel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
_____. Archy Does His Part. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1935.
_____. The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel. Edited by Michael Sims. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
_____. Dreams and Dust. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915.
Maxwell, William. “The Whites.” In The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews. New York: Knopf, 1989.
McCook, Henry C. American Spiders and Their Spinningwork: A Natural History of the Orbweaving Spiders of the United States with Special Regard to Their Industry and Habits. Published by the author, 1889.
McCord, David. “E. B. White.” In 20th-Century Children’s Writers, edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
Neumeyer, Peter F. The Annotated Charlotte’s Web. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Nordstrom, Ursula. Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. Edited by Leonard S. Marcus. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
Ross, Harold. Letters from the Editor. Edited by Thomas Kunkel. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Russell, Isabel. Katharine and E. B. White: An Affectionate Memoir. New York: Norton, 1984.
Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Schmitt, Peter J. Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Seton, Ernest Thompson. Lives of the Hunted: Containing a True Account of the Doings of Five Quadrupeds and Three Birds and, in Elucidation of the Same, over 200 Drawings. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902.
_____. Wild Animals I Have Known. New York: Scribner’s 1899.
Silvey, Anita, editor. Children’s Books and Their Creators. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
Sims, Michael. “A View from the Under Side.” Introduction to The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Stewart, Frank. A Natural History of Nature Writing. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995.
St. Nicholas magazine. Various issues, 1873–1917.
Tatar, Maria. Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.
Thorson, Robert M. Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds. New York: Walker & Company, 2009.
Thurber, James. The Years with Ross. Boston: Atlantic Monthly/Little Brown, 1959.
_____. Selected Letters of James Thurber. Edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.
_____. The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles. Edited by Michael J. Rosen. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Wake, Lynn Overholt. “E. B. White’s Paean to Life: The Environmental Imagination of Charlotte’s Web.” In Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.
_____. “E. B. White’s Environmental Web.” Ph.D. dissertation, English Department, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2007.
White, Katharine S. Onward and Upward in the Garden. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979.
Yagoda, Ben. About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. New York: Scribner, 2000.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL SIMS is the author of acclaimed nonfiction such as Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form and Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, as well as a companion book to the National Geographic Channel TV series In the Womb: Animals. He is also the editor of several literary collections, including The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, and Dracula’s Guest, the first volume of his new Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Fiction for Bloomsbury. His writing has appeared in many periodicals, including the Times of London, Chronicle of Higher Education, Orion, New Statesman, and Washington Post. Please visit Michael’s Web site at www.michaelsimsbooks.com.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (editor)
Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of
Victorian Vampire Stories (editor)
In the Womb: Animals (companion to a National Geographic Channel series)
The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime (editor)
Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (editor)
The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (editor)
Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Sims
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Quotations from E. B. White’s unpublished manuscripts in the E. B. White Papers, as well as photographs and drawings in the E. B. White Papers (Collection #4619, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library), are used by permission of Cornell University Library and the executors of the E. B. White Estate.
Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7754-6 (hardcover)
First published in the U.S. by Walker Publishing Company in 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011
E-book ISBN: 978-0-8027-7817-8
Visit Walker & Company’s Web site at www.walkerbooks.com