Stuart Little

Stuart Little was published in 1945 and was E. B. White's first book for children, written years before Charlotte's Web. White was a New Yorker essayist and the co-author, with William Strunk, of the style guide that generations of students have argued about. The novel was illustrated by Garth Williams, in what was also his first work for children, and the two of them went on to make Charlotte's Web together.

The book is episodic rather than plotted. Stuart is born, treated by the family doctor as a small person rather than a curiosity, and then sent out into a series of set pieces: a model boat race on the pond, a night in a doll's house, a classroom where he stands in for a teacher, and a road trip. White's humour is dry and adult in a way that children's publishers of the period were not always comfortable with, and the novel's open ending, with Stuart driving north in search of the bird Margalo, has been the subject of complaint and admiration ever since it appeared.

The book has been adapted for film and television, most prominently in a 1999 film and its sequels, and an audiobook read by Julie Harris is the version many American readers grew up with. It sits beside Charlotte's Web as the second, and less tidy, of White's books for children.

The open ending is the part readers argue about, because Stuart drives away at the close of the book in search of a bird he befriended, and White never wrote the sequel that would have told them whether he found her. White was working at The New Yorker while he wrote it, and the short chapters read as if they had been told aloud, which is how a good many of them began.