Garth Williams

Background on each of the two specials we're about to watch.

The Cricket in Times Square, 1960 children's book by George Seldon and illustrated by Garth Williams.

Seldon wrote a total of six books in this series.

He made a bunch of sequels between 1960 and 1987.

She received hundreds and hundreds of, of letters from adoring fans, but toward the end of her life, she was no longer able to respond to all of them as she initially had done.

In 1953, a new edition of the Little House books was released with the illustrations that most of us know by Garth Williams, and then in 1957, she died, and she died at home.

She had been struggling with diabetes, and she-- it was, it was a very quiet death.

Rose Wilder Lane supervised the funeral, supervised going through the house.

Oh, right.

Garth Williams.

Yeah, Garth Williams.

White actually boxed up and sent his own scientific reference materials, his entomology books, to Williams, and White gave strict, uncompromising instructions, "Charlotte must look like a real spider."

No big cartoon eyes.

It's the manure, the rats, and the rot that make the magic actually matter.

White is asking you to look at the dirt because that's where real life happens.

And Garth Williams' illustrations do so much of that heavy lifting to ground the reader in that dirt.