Charlotte’s Web Summary

By E. B. White, Charlotte’s web is a story that takes the setting of a barn and the life of animals. It explores friendship and celebrates farm life.

A Short Plot Overview

The story kicks off with Fern Arable rescuing a pig named Wilbur from being slaughtered. She cares for the pig who beats death. Mr. Arable, Fern’s father, does not like how his daughter is attached to the pig, which in real sense was getting bred to be later slaughtered. He sends Wilbur to Mr. Zuckerman’s farm, Fern’s uncle.

Wilbur is lonely and misses her, but he meets Charlotte, a spider and other farm animals such as Templeton, a rat. Wilbur learns what he was being bred for and the Charlottes decides to help him escape the fate.

She spins a web that says Some Pig above Wilbur’s pen. Mr. Zucker spots it who sees it as a miracle. Templeton becomes the messenger to finding new words for Charlotte to spin like Terrific. Wilbur gets some fame because of it, and he is taken to the fair. Charlotte and Templeton resume their work of finding great labels for Wilbur. The Zuckerman’s could never kill their pig, which they indeed saw as special.

However, some time to the fair, Charlotte is dying. It seems sudden, but then spiders do not have a very long life span. There was more. She had created a sac that contained 514 eggs, and she would not be alive to see them hatch. They were stranded at the fair, and this puts them in a tough situation. Charlotte entrusts her eggs to Wilbur and later dies. Wilbur steps up and carries the sac of eggs back to their farm. The eggs hatch. Three of the little children of Charlotte decide to stay at the barn with Wilbur, and they live happily.