Charlotte's Web Summary

Charlotte's Web has 22 chapters, each with a title, running from spring through to the following spring. Here is the structure:

Fern and the runt (chapters 1-4)

• 1. Before Breakfast — Fern stops her father killing the runt of the litter
• 2. Wilbur — he is raised by hand, then sold to Homer Zuckerman
• 3. Escape — Wilbur gets out of the barnyard and is lured back with slops
• 4. Loneliness — a rainy day, and a voice in the dark promising friendship

The friendship (chapters 5-10)

• 5. Charlotte — Wilbur meets the spider and is unnerved by how she eats
• 6. Summer Days — the goose's eggs hatch
• 7. Bad News — the old sheep tells Wilbur he is being fattened for Christmas
• 8. A Talk at Home / 9. Wilbur's Boast / 10. An Explosion — Wilbur tries to spin a web, and Charlotte begins to plan

The words in the web (chapters 11-15)

• 11. The Miracle — "SOME PIG" appears and the news spreads
• 12. A Meeting / 13. Good Progress — "TERRIFIC" and "RADIANT" follow
• 14. Dr. Dorian / 15. The Crickets — the adults reason about miracles, and summer starts to end

The fair (chapters 16-21)

• 16. Off to the Fair / 17. Uncle — the rival pig in the next pen
• 18. The Cool of the Evening / 19. The Egg Sac — Charlotte writes "HUMBLE" and makes her final web
• 20. The Hour of Triumph — Wilbur wins a special prize
• 21. Last Day — Charlotte dies at the fairground, and Wilbur carries her egg sac home

After (chapter 22)

• 22. A Warm Wind — spring returns, Charlotte's children hatch, and three of them stay

The chapters are short and self-contained, which is why the book is so often read aloud one chapter a night.

This Charlotte's Web summary opens on the Arable farm with one of the most famous first lines in children's literature: Fern asks her mother where her father is going with that axe. A sow has had eleven piglets and one is a runt, too small to be worth raising. Fern argues that killing him would be unjust, wins, and is allowed to keep him. She names him Wilbur and raises him on a bottle until he is five weeks old, when her father insists he be sold. Wilbur goes to Fern's uncle Homer Zuckerman, on the farm across the road, where Fern can visit him.

Wilbur settles into the barn cellar among geese, sheep and a scheming rat called Templeton. He is comfortable but desperately lonely, and one wet afternoon he asks the barn whether anyone will be his friend. A voice answers that it will tell him in the morning. The voice belongs to Charlotte A. Cavatica, a large grey spider who lives in the doorway above him. Wilbur is delighted by her and appalled by her diet, and White refuses to soften either reaction: Charlotte is bloodthirsty and she is kind, and both are true.

Then the old sheep tells Wilbur the thing nobody else has said aloud. He is not being fed so well for nothing; the Zuckermans intend to kill him around Christmas. Wilbur panics, and Charlotte makes him a flat promise: she will save him. Her plan depends on knowing something Wilbur does not, which is that people will believe almost anything they read. One morning the Zuckermans find the words SOME PIG woven into the web above the pigpen. The hired man calls it a miracle, the minister preaches about it, and sightseers begin arriving to look at a pig.

Charlotte keeps writing. TERRIFIC follows, then RADIANT, with Templeton bribed into scavenging scraps of advertising from the dump to supply new words. Wilbur, told that he is radiant, begins to behave as though he is, and the fuss keeps him alive through the summer. In the farmhouse, Mrs. Arable frets that Fern spends all her time listening to animals talk, and the doctor, Dr. Dorian, gently points out that a spider building a web is no less miraculous than a spider writing one — the book's quiet answer to its own plot.

As summer ends the Zuckermans take Wilbur to the county fair, and Charlotte and Templeton travel in the crate with him. Wilbur is up against Uncle, an enormous pig in the neighbouring pen, and loses the blue ribbon. Charlotte, exhausted and near the end of her life, spins one last word above him — HUMBLE — and the judges award Wilbur a special prize for the extraordinary pig the whole county has read about. His survival is now guaranteed.

But Charlotte is dying. Spiders of her kind live a single season, and she has spent her last strength on two things: Wilbur's prize and a small grey egg sac holding five hundred and fourteen eggs. She cannot travel home. Wilbur, frantic, persuades Templeton to fetch the sac down for him and carries it back to the barn in his mouth. Charlotte dies alone at the deserted fairground, and White gives the moment a single unsentimental sentence.

Back in the barn, Wilbur guards the egg sac through the winter. In spring the spiderlings hatch, and almost all of them balloon away on the warm wind. Three stay in the doorway, and Wilbur has friends again — as he will every year afterwards, though none of them ever replaces Charlotte.

Charlotte's Web ends with a death and a spring, in that order.

At the county fair, Charlotte spins the word HUMBLE above Wilbur's pen and he is given a special prize by the judges, which means the Zuckermans will never slaughter him. She has also spun her egg sac, which she calls her magnum opus, containing five hundred and fourteen eggs. When Wilbur asks why she did all of it for him, she gives the book's most quoted answer: "You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing." She tells him she is dying, and that she is too weak to make the journey back to the farm.

Wilbur bribes Templeton with the promise of first choice of the trough for life, and the rat climbs up and cuts down the egg sac so Wilbur can carry it home in his mouth. Charlotte stays behind. She dies the next day at the empty fairground, unnoticed by anyone, and White states it plainly: no one was with her when she died.

Winter passes with Wilbur guarding the sac in the barn doorway. In the chapter called "A Warm Wind", the spiderlings hatch and then, one after another, throw out threads and balloon away on the breeze — a loss that nearly breaks Wilbur until three of them decide to stay and make their webs in the doorway. Joy, Aranea and Nellie become his friends, and the pattern repeats through the years that follow.

The final page steps back to survey Wilbur's whole life on the farm and ends on the sentence that has made generations of readers cry: Wilbur never forgot Charlotte, none of her descendants ever quite took her place in his heart, and "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

These are some of the most loved verbatim lines from Charlotte's Web by E. B. White, from the famous first sentence to the last page:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?"

"You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing."

"I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die."

"By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

The last line is the closing sentence of the novel, and the reason so many readers remember Charlotte's Web as the first book that made them cry.