[1] In Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and in the Little House series[broken anchor] of books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Williams['s] drawings have become inseparable from how we think of those stories.
In that respect ... Williams['s] work belongs in the same class as Sir John Tenniel's drawings for Alice in Wonderland, or Ernest Shepard's illustrations for Winnie the Pooh.
He continued his education at the British School at Rome in Germany and Italy, until the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
In London, he volunteered with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense ambulances, and helped collect the dead and injured from the streets.
Then, in 1945, he received his first commission as an illustrator, from editor Ursula Nordstrom of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls.
[5] 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 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.
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.
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 ... as Laura would have done, as a happy, flower bedecked refuge from the elements, with the music of the nearby stream.
In 1958, Garth Williams wrote and illustrated a picture book that caused a small uproar: The Rabbits' Wedding.
[6] Senator Eddins, with the support of the White Citizens' Council and other segregationists, demanded that it be removed from all Alabama libraries because of its perceived themes of racial integration and interracial marriage.
In the end, the book was not banned outright, but rather placed on special reserve shelves in the state library agency-run facilities.
His second wife Dorothea (née Dessauer), formerly his children's nanny, was an Austrian Jewish artist whose affluent parents died in the Holocaust.
For the last 40 years of his life Williams divided most of his time between a restored hacienda in Guanajuato and in his home in San Antonio, Texas.
The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies, a 1951 anthology, is noteworthy for Williams' extensive use of colored pencil.
The Rabbits' Wedding (1958), which employed a limited palette of only a few delicate colors, contained some of the best-reproduced examples of his ability to convey hair, hide, grass, and fur textures.