Michael Sims

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring book, E. B. White was obeying the maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats--White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. Painfully shy his entire life, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It is all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship with E. B. White. In this book the author shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole" by mining the raw ore of his childhood friendship with animals, translating his own passions and contradictions, delights and fears, into an all time classic.--From publisher description.