He was part of a colony of expatriates who built or rebuilt homes in the ruins of the silver mines of colonial Mexico. In the latter part of his life Williams lived primarily in Marfil, a small town west of Guanajuato, Mexico. 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 all, Williams illustrated eleven of Brown's books. 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. Shortly thereafter he began his collaboration with Margaret Wise Brown with The Little Fur Family, Harper's answer to Simon & Schuster's Pat the Bunny. Williams later said that seeing grownups on buses and trains reading Stuart Little persuaded him to continue as a freelance illustrator. The book became a success with adults as well as children. White the book was Stuart Little.' The Whites had wanted Robert Lawson to work on the project, but had burned through eight illustrators. In a fortuitous coincidence, when the manuscript arrived the author had pinned a note to it: 'Try Garth Williams'. The story is that Nordstrom 'told him she was expecting a manuscript that he might illustrate. 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. He drew for The New Yorker for a mutually unfulfilling period of time. In the United States, Williams worked making lenses at a war plant, applied for work as a camouflage artist, contributed war-effort posters to the British-American Art Center in New York, and brought his portfolio around to the major publishing houses. After a bomb blast vaporized a friend who had been walking next to him, he sent his wife and daughter to Canada, and reunited with them in New York in 1942. In London he volunteered with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense ambulances, and helped collect the dead and injured from the streets. He continued his education at the British School at Rome in Germany and Italy, until the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He began his studies at Westminster School of Art in 1929, and in 1931 was awarded a four-year scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where he created a sculpture that was awarded the British Prix de Rome. But when the Great Depression came he made up his mind to be an artist instead of an architect. Williams studied architecture and worked for a time as an architect's assistant. 'Everybody in my home was always either painting or drawing.' He grew up on farms in New Jersey and Canada until the family moved to the United Kingdom in 1922. His father was a cartoonist for Punch, his mother was a landscape painter.

Garth Williams was born in New York City in 1912 to artists from England.

Stuart little garth williams