manuscript that he might illustrate. By coincidence, when the manuscript arrived the author had pinned a note to it: 'Try Garth Williams'. The author was E. B. White; the book was Stuart Little." The Whites had wanted Robert Lawson to work on the project, but had burned through eight illustrators. The book became a success with adults as well as children. Williams later said that seeing grownups on buses and trains reading Stuart Little persuaded him to continue as a freelance illustrator. Soon after, he began collaborating with Margaret Wise Brown with The Little Fur Family, Harper's answer to Simon & Schuster's Pat the Bunny. Nordstrom knew that the book would be a success when a mother wrote to tell her that her little boy had held open his copy at the dinner table, and tried to feed it his supper. In all, Williams illustrated eleven of Brown's books. In 1951 he illustrated Charlotte's Web (1952); his eldest child Fiona, who was a toddler when the family escaped the Blitz, was his model for Fern Arable. In the latter part of his life, Williams lived primarily in Marfil, a small town west of Guanajuato, Mexico. He was part of a colony of expatriates who built or rebuilt homes in the ruins of the silver mines of colonial Mexico. At 81, he estimated that he had illustrated 97 books. Little House illustrations (1953) Williams received the commission to illustrate the new Little House edition in about 1947. To know the worlds of Laura's childhood, Williams, who had never been west of the Hudson River, traveled the American Midwest to the places the Ingalls family had lived 70 years before, photographing and sketching landscapes, trees, birds and wildlife, buildings and towns. The trip culminated in a search along the riverbank along Plum Creek where the family had once built their dugout home. Williams writes, in his 1953 account "I did not expect to find the house, but I felt certain that it would have left an indentation in the bank. A light rain did not help my search, and I was about to give up when ahead of me I saw exactly what I was looking for, a hollow in the east bank of Plum Creek. I felt very well rewarded, for the scene fitted Mrs Wilder's description perfectly...." [He] wanted to ... be able to see the house on Plum Creek