The Little Book is about big things: the clash of the modern world with the Victorian and the tension between style and sentiment. It is also about the labor of writing and the labor of love, all of it unfolding through a battle over a little book about a little mouse.

In the late 1930s, as part of her campaigns as the first and most influential American children’s librarian, Anne Carroll Moore began a correspondence with E.B. White, then best known as the voice of The New Yorker. She pressed him to write a children’s book, to bring his wry humor to a new audience. But when White finally produced his now-beloved Stuart Little, Moore was shocked, declaring the book the “product of a sick mind.” She stonewalled, refusing to recommend the book to her burgeoning network of librarians, an action that could sink the financial prospects of the book throughout the nation.

Also at stake is the long and passionate partnership between Katharine and E.B. White. As a powerful editor—not to mention the first and, for a time, only female editor—at The New Yorker, Katharine was E.B.’s boss. The two were deeply in love—with each other, and with writing. But when E.B. pressed them into abandoning New York for a farm in Maine, fissures began to form. And so, Anne Carroll Moore’s and Katharine White’s competing philosophies about children’s literature, their roles as powerful women of influence in their separate fields, and their observations about life in and out of New York City serve as the foundation for the piece.