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10 Famous Storybook Locations That Exist In The Real World
When children wrote to author EB White asking if his stories were true, he said they were not, but that, “Real life is only one kind of life. There is also the life of the imagination.”
Sometimes the two commingle: a riverside estate is reimagined as a pirate ship, a common cowpath leads to a lovers’ lane, and an evanescent cat grins from the branch of a chestnut tree. Here are ten classic children’s books, set in places that exist not only in the writer’s imagination but in real life too:
Charlotte’s Web
On an autumn morning in 1949, EB White noticed something truly terrific in his barn: a large gray spider spinning a web. In October, the spider added an egg sac. White cut out the sac, put it in a candy box poked with air holes and took it to his home in New York. Within weeks the spiders hatched and spun webs of their own. This gave White an idea for a story about the life cycle of spiders and animals, barn animals in general, and pigs in particular. And in 1952 readers were introduced to the weaver of the original web: Charlotte.
Charlotte’s Web was spun at EB White’s farm in North Brooklin, Maine. He and his wife Katharine bought the property in 1933. At first, the Whites only spent summers there; the rest of the year they lived in Manhattan where they…
