Yes, Charlotte's Web Is Banned!

Charlotte’s Web is the story of a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte, who saves his life by weaving words into her web. When Charlotte writes “SOME PIG” above Wilbur’s pen, the farmer decides to spare him from slaughter. Published in 1952 by Harper & Brothers with illustrations by Garth Williams, it’s sold over 45 million copies, been translated into 23 languages, and earned the 1953 Newbery Honor. It is, by any measure, one of the most beloved children’s books ever written.

In 2006, parents in a Kansas school district challenged Charlotte’s Web on religious grounds, arguing that talking animals are “blasphemous and unnatural.” Additional objections targeted Charlotte’s death scene as “inappropriate subject matter for a children’s book.” The book appears on the ALA’s frequently challenged classics list. It’s been challenged in the United Kingdom as well, with some parents objecting to the depiction of a spider dying as too upsetting for young readers.

Why You Should Read This

E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web in his barn in Maine, watching real spiders spin real webs, and thinking about friendship and mortality. Charlotte dies at the end. Her egg sac hatches, and three of her daughters stay in the barn with Wilbur. It’s one of the most quietly devastating endings in all of children’s literature, and it’s been making kids cry for seventy years because it tells the truth: love doesn’t stop death, but it makes life mean something.

Calling talking animals “blasphemous” is a position so extreme it would be funny if it hadn’t actually gotten the book challenged. Charlotte’s Web is a story about kindness, loyalty, and the fact that everything alive eventually dies. It treats children as people who can handle that truth. Taking it away from them because a spider talks, or because a spider dies, misunderstands both the book and the children it’s written for.