The New York Times celebrates the kid lit classic.
From the article...
Back on his new farm in Maine as an adult, after he settled in, White
rejuvenated the old barn with pink newborn pigs, yammering klatches of
geese and cliques of thoughtful-looking sheep. Rats came in uninvited,
as they had to the stable, and reprised their role as gluttonous
thieves. The smell of hay and the wary gaze of cows became part of
White’s rural days, just as the subway and pigeons were at the other
pole of his elliptical life, as a writer for The New Yorker from the
1920s to the 1980s.
Inevitably, though, the morality of farming troubled White, especially
his betrayal of a pig’s trust when he suddenly turned from provider to
executioner. In the fall of 1947, a pig he had planned to slaughter
became ill, and White labored heroically but failed to save its life, a
sad farce he immortalized in his 1948 essay “Death of a Pig.” In his
animal-populated imagination, however, the pig lived on. White began to
envision stories in which the poor animal’s life might be endangered —
only this time it would survive.
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