Recording the audiobook of Charlotte’s Web in a makeshift studio in Maine, E.B. White needed seventeen takes to get through the death of a spider, stepping outside to compose himself and breaking down again. This episode explores the emotional engine behind the 1952 classic, beginning with the 1948 essay about a pig White had bought to butcher, then desperately nursed through the night, and lost. Scholars read the novel as his attempt to save that pig through fiction.

The conversation follows the large gray spider he found in his barn in October 1950, his letter to Vladimir Nabokov, the referral to arachnologist Willis J. Gertsch, the entomology texts of John Henry Comstock, and the decision to rename Charlotte A. Cavatica to match current science. It covers his rejection of Garth Williams’s sketches of a spider with a human face, the restructured opening in which Fern grabs her father’s axe, the book’s treatment of mortality, change and lost innocence, the Newbery Medal it did not win in 1953, and the adaptations that followed while White kept his farm closed to the public.

• A farmer’s guilt over a pig he could not save, rewritten as a rescue
• Nabokov, the American Museum of Natural History and ballooning spiderlings
• Why White insisted Charlotte look like a real spider, mouth claws and all
• Opening on an axe: how the first chapter was rebuilt for urgency
• Wilbur, Templeton and Charlotte as three different views of death