Description
E. B. White is one of the most beloved names in children’s literature, with works including Charlotte’s Web, Trumpet of the Swan, and Stuart Little earning him a Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Award for Literature, among numerous other accolades. But White was an extremely prolific essayist in addition to writing novels, contributing over eighteen hundred pieces to The New Yorker over the course of his life.
White spent many years living and working in New York City, but he dearly cherished his summers spent living on his family farm in Brooklin, Maine. It was on the farm that White wrote this essay, detailing the experience of caring for, and losing, one of his pigs. White describes the steps taken to try to save a pig that grew ill one summer, struggling to alleviate his pain and help him recover, while dealing with White’s own grief and the irony of mourning the death of a pig who was being raised for slaughter.
Although White himself never confirmed it, others have written that “Death of a Pig” was the essay that inspired, or perhaps catalyzed, the writing of Charlotte’s Web. Gerald Weales wrote in The New York Times that Charlotte’s Web attempted “to save his pig in retrospect,” giving White an alternative ending, albeit literary, for the tragedy that he details so poignantly in this essay.
Thornwillow is honored to present the first-ever fine press edition of this 1948 essay with a frontispiece featuring an exclusive photograph of the author from the private collection of his granddaughter, Martha White.
