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White was born in suburban New York, but he was a Mainer by inclination. Although clarity was the chief virtue of his writing, he was always intentionally fuzzy on the subject of where he lived. After publication of Charlotte's Web in particular, he was bedeviled by tourists and busloads of schoolchildren arriving unannounced for a tour of the famous barn. In the New Yorker he published a series of essays under the dateline "Allen Cove," a designation that appears only on nautical maps. "That way," he said, "no one will be able to find [the farm] except by sailboat and using a chart."
His neighbors respected his reticence and shared it. They're Mainers, after all. "We're private people," one of them told me, "and we protect the privacy of others. And we're always rather surprised when someone else doesn't." That protectiveness holds even today, 14 years after White's death. In the local library one morning, I struck up a conversation with a man who used to run the general store.
"Mr. White always left town on his birthday," he said, "because that's when the reporters would show up, bothering him. He'd tell us at the store where he was going, but nobody else."
No kidding, I said. Where would he go to hide?
"Oh, I can't tell you that," the man said.
I pressed him a little. After all, I said, Mr. White is--well, dead.
"Sir," the man said, offended, "I told Mr. White I wouldn't tell anybody. And I'm not going to."
And he didn't.