Beverly Cleary, beloved author who chronicled feisty kids, dies at 104

Beverly Cleary was a new librarian in Yakima, Wash., when, as she later recalled, “A little boy faced me rather ferociously across the circulation desk and said, ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’”

She was stumped. There were many volumes about precocious British tots with “nannies and pony carts,” she said, but none that would appeal to “grubby neighborhood kids” like the boy before her – or to the adventure-seeking girl she had once been.

That encounter in the library set Cleary, who died March 25 at 104, on her way to becoming one of the most beloved children’s authors of all time, a chronicler of childhood who found the whole of human experience within the ordinary high jinks of growing up.

She died in Carmel, Calif., said her publisher HarperCollins, which did not give a cause.

She wrote more than 40 books, many about high-spirited youngsters such as the spunky Ramona Quimby and adventurous Henry Huggins, a third-grader with hair “like a scrubbing brush” and with a knack for getting into gentle scrapes with his mutt, Ribsy.

In her stories, quotidian tribulations – the challenges of managing an unwieldy paper route, dealing with a fractious sibling or coping with an absent parent – became tales of triumph.

The books sold more than 85 million copies and became, like the works of Maurice Sendak and Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, essential reading for generations of schoolchildren. They earned Cleary some of the highest distinctions in her field, including the Newbery Medal and Newbery Honor, as well as the National Medal of Arts, bestowed by President George W. Bush in 2003.

She aimed her stories squarely at an elementary school audience and hoped that, by creating relatable characters, she would inspire in her young readers a lifelong love of books. Her writing was distinguished by what essayist Benjamin Schwarz of the Atlantic magazine once called her gift for “photographic and psychological exactitude.”

She pulled heavily from memories of what she once described as her “free and wild” youth in Oregon, first on a farm and then in Depression-era Portland, employing what she called “all the bits of knowledge about children, reading and writing that had clung to me like burrs or dandelion fluff.”