Summary
For decades, E.B. White's charming, bittersweet tales of friendship and adventure have enchanted audiences young and old alike. Now the magic of this beloved classic comes to life in a delightful and completely unabridged recording, read by award-winning actress Julie Harris. Stuart Little is a shy, philosophical little mouse with a big heart and a taste for adventure. In spite of his diminutive stature, barely two inches tall, Stuart sets forth into the world wtih some mighty big plans: to ride a Fifth Avenue bus, to win a sailboat race in Central Park, and to teach school for a day. But Stuart's greatest adventure begins when he decides to find his best friend, Margalo, a pretty little bird who once lived in a Boston fern in the Littles' house in New York City. Climbing into his tiny car, Stuart hits the open road, sure he's heading in the right direction, only to find himself in for a big surprise. Filled with warmth, wit and wonder, Stuart Little, is a timeless tale that speaks to the heroic spirit in all of us -- no matter what our size.
Born in Mount Vernon, New York, E. B. White was educated at Cornell University and served as a private in World War I. After several years as a journalist, he joined the staff of the New Yorker, then in its infancy. For 11 years he wrote most of the "Talk of the Town" columns, and it was White and James Thurber who can be credited with setting the style and attitude of the magazine. In 1938 he retired to a saltwater farm in Maine, where he wrote essays regularly for Harper's Magazine under the title "One Man's Meat." Like Thoreau, White preferred the woods; he also resembled Thoreau in his impatience and indignation.
White received several prizes: in 1960, the gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1963, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award (he was honored along with Thornton Wilder and Edmund Wilson); and in 1978, a special Pulitzer Prize. His verse is original and witty but with serious undertones. His friend James Thurber described him as "a poet who loves to live half-hidden from the eye." Three of his books have become children's classics: Stuart Little (1945), about a mouse born into a human family, Charlotte's Web (1952), about a spider who befriends a lonely pig, and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). Among his best-known and most widely used books is The Elements of Style (1959), a guide to grammar and rhetoric based on a text written by one of his professors at Cornell, William Strunk, which White revised and expanded. White was married to Katherine Angell, the first fiction editor of the New Yorker.
(Bowker Author Biography)
