E. B. White - Children's Books

Children's Books

In the late 1930s, White turned his hand to children's fiction on behalf of a niece, Janice Hart White. His first children's book, Stuart Little, which was published in 1945, and Charlotte's Web, which appeared in 1952. Stuart Little initially received a lukewarm welcome from the literary community due in part to the reluctance to endorse it by Anne Carroll Moore, the retired but still powerful children's librarian from the New York Public Library. However, both books went on to receive high acclaim and, in 1970, jointly won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, a major prize in children's literature. In the same year, White published his third children's novel, The Trumpet of the Swan. In 1973, that book received the Sequoyah Award from Oklahoma and the William Allen White Award from Kansas, both of which were awarded by students voting for their favorite book of the year.