Charlotte's Web

E.B. White (called "En" when he was young and "Andy" when he was grown), grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. As a boy, En spent time at Great Pond (one of Maine's Belgrade Lakes). During those annual summer visits with his family, White fell in love with the state.

In 1933, Andy and his wife, Katharine, bought a Maine saltwater farm (so called because it was near a saltwater estuary). At first, he commuted between the farm and New York City, where he worked as a magazine writer (first for The New Yorker, then for Harper's). But the call of the farm was strong, and the Whites eventually lived there full-time.

The Maine that E. B. White knew best - and loved most - was the picturesque Acadia region of the state. The Whites lived on the Blue Hill Peninsula in a tiny town called North Brooklin. (Location of "Down East" Maine is located in the "Down East" part of Maine.) Whatever the season, the entire Blue Hill area is a beautiful place.

Andy White felt close to nature and to animals. One of his favorite writers was Henry David Thoreau. (It is said that White always had a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him, no matter where he went.) In addition to his writing, which he did in a small boathouse on his property, Andy White worked his farm. His stepson, Roger Angell, describes the place as:

a saltwater farmer with a hundred and fifty pullets [young female chickens], a dozen geese, twenty or thirty sheep ... When the war came, he even took on a cow - the first time he leads her out to the pasture, he writes, he feels "the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theatre" - and his production goals for 1942 were four thousand dozen eggs, ten pigs, and nine thousand pounds of milk. (The New Yorker, February 14 and 21, 2005)

This was the farm where Andy White lost his pig and saw a barn spider spinning her web. It is, in reality, the Zuckerman farm of Charlotte's Web.

It is now time to ask: Who, exactly, is Charlotte? And how is it possible for her to spin a web?