Editing Stuart Little (section)

==Background==
In a letter White wrote in response to inquiries from readers, he described how he came to conceive of Stuart Little: "Many years ago, I went to bed one night in a railway sleeping car, and during the night I dreamed about a tiny boy who acted rather like a rat. That's how the story of ''Stuart Little'' got started".<ref name=White-2010-03-24/>
He had the dream in the spring of 1926, while sleeping on a train on his way back to New York from a visit to the [[Shenandoah Valley]].<ref name=Sims-2011/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 145}} As [[Michael Sims|Sims]] (2011) wrote that Stuart "arrived in [White's] mind in a direct shipment from the subconscious."<ref name=Sims-2011/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 145}}

White typed up a few stories about Stuart, which he told to his 18&nbsp;nieces and nephews when they asked him to tell them a story.
In 1935, White's wife [[Katharine Sergeant Angell White|Katharine]] showed these stories to [[Clarence Day]], then a regular contributor to ''[[The New Yorker]]''. Day liked the stories and encouraged White not to neglect them, but neither [[Oxford University Press]] nor [[Viking Press]] was interested in the stories,<ref name=Elledge-1986/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 254}} and White did not immediately develop them further.<ref name=Sims-2011/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 146}}

In the fall of 1938, as his wife wrote her annual collection of children's book reviews for ''[[The New Yorker]]'', White wrote a few paragraphs in his "One Man's Meat" column in ''[[Harper's Magazine]]'' about writing children's books.<ref name=Elledge-1986/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 254}} [[Anne Carroll Moore]], the head children's librarian at the [[New York Public Library]], read this column and responded by encouraging him to write a children's book that would "make the library lions roar".<ref name=Elledge-1986/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 254}}

White's editor at [[Harper (publisher)|Harper]], who had heard about the Stuart stories from Katherine, asked to see them, and by March&nbsp;1939 was intent on publishing them. Around that time, White wrote to [[James Thurber]] that he was "about half done" with the book; however, he did not finish it until the winter of 1944–1945.<ref name=Elledge-1986/>{{rp|style=ama|p= 255}}