Beverly Cleary, children’s book author, dies at 104

Beverly Cleary, who enthralled tens of millions of young readers with the adventures and mishaps of Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the bratty Ramona Quimby and her older sister Beezus, and other residents of Klickitat Street, died Thursday in Carmel, Calif. She was 104.

The death was announced by HarperCollins, her publisher.

With “Henry Huggins,” published in 1950, Cleary, a librarian by trade, introduced a contemporary note into children’s literature. In a humorous, lively style, she made compelling drama out of the everyday problems, small injustices and perplexing mysteries — adults chief among them — that define middle-class American childhood.

Always sympathetic, never condescending, she presented her readers with characters they knew and understood, the 20th-century equivalents of Huck Finn or Louisa May Alcott’s little women, and every bit as popular: Her books sold more than 85 million copies, according to HarperCollins. To this gallery of human characters she added an animal counterpart: the motorcycle-riding Ralph S. Mouse, resident of the Mountain View Inn in the Sierra Nevada.

“Cleary is funny in a very sophisticated way,” Roger Sutton, editor of The Horn Book, told The New York Times in April 2011. “She gets very close to satire, which I think is why adults like her, but she’s still deeply respectful of her characters — nobody gets a laugh at the expense of another. I think kids appreciate that they’re on a level playing field with adults.”

Beverly Atlee Bunn was born on April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Ore.. She spent her early childhood on the family farm in nearby Yamhill. Her father lost the farm when she was 6 and moved the family to Portland, where he worked as a bank security guard.

The children’s books she read at school disappointed, she recalled in an article for The Horn Book in 1982. The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.

“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote.

At a library job in Yakima, Wash., Cleary had been particularly touched by the plight of a group of boys who asked her, “Where are the books about us?”

She began telling her own stories, along with fairy tales and folk tales, at schools and libraries. These became the basis for her first book, “Henry Huggins,” about a third-grader who adopts a stray dog he names Ribsy because he is so skinny his ribs show. “Henry Huggins was in the third grade,” it began. “His hair looked like a scrubbing brush and most of his grown-up front teeth were in.” The book was immediately popular.

Ramona Quimby, introduced in a small role as the annoying younger sister of Henry’s friend Beatrice, better known as Beezus, emerged as a superstar.

Her credo: “A littler person sometimes had to be a little bit noisier and a little bit more stubborn in order to be noticed at all.”