Stuart Little. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. First Edition, First issue (with I-U on copyright page). Handsomely bound in full smooth green morocco, gilt fillet boarder to upper & lower covers, spine with raised bands, title lettered in gilt to second & fourth compartment with gilt lozenges to others. the original pictorial endpapers & front cover bound-in at rear. A fine bright copy.

Stuart Little is E. B. White’s first children’s book. White, then better known as a founding member of The New Yorker, began writing Stuart Little “in the hope of amusing a six-year-old niece of his,” but, as the dust jacket blurb noted, “before he finished it she had grown up and was reading Hemingway.” White’s background as a columnist exposes itself in the novel’s episodic format, which tells a series of Stuart’s adventures rather than an overarching plot.

As Malcolm Cowley proclaimed in his 1945 New York Times review, “To say that ‘Stuart Little’ is one of the best children’s books published this year is very modest praise for a writer of his talent.”