Beverly Cleary, beloved children's author, dies aged 104
Beverly Cleary, the celebrated children’s author whose memories of her Oregon childhood were shared with millions through the likes of Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins, has died. She was 104.
Cleary’s publisher HarperCollins announced Friday that the author died Thursday in Northern California, where she had lived since the 1960s. No cause of death was given.
Trained as a librarian, Cleary didn’t start writing books until her early 30s when she wrote Henry Huggins, published in 1950. Children worldwide came to love the adventures of Huggins and his neighbors Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby and her younger sister, Ramona. They inhabit a down-home, wholesome setting on Klickitat Street – a real street in Portland, Oregon, the city where Cleary spent much of her youth.
Among the “Henry” titles were Henry and Ribsy, Henry and the Paper Route and Henry and Beezus.
Ramona, perhaps her best-known character, made her debut in Henry Huggins with only a brief mention.
“All the children appeared to be only children so I tossed in a little sister and she didn’t go away. She kept appearing in every book,” she said in a March 2016 telephone interview from her California home.
Cleary herself was an only child and said the character wasn’t a mirror.
“I was a well-behaved little girl, not that I wanted to be,” she said. “At the age of Ramona, in those days, children played outside. We played hopscotch and jump rope and I loved them and always had scraped knees.”
In all, there were eight books on Ramona between Beezus and Ramona in 1955 and Ramona’s World in 1999.
Cleary wasn’t writing recently because she said she felt “it’s important for writers to know when to quit”.
“I even got rid of my typewriter. It was a nice one but I hate to type. When I started writing I found that I was thinking more about my typing than what I was going to say, so I wrote it longhand,” she said in March 2016.
Although she put away her pen, Cleary re-released three of her most cherished books with three famous fans – the actor Amy Poehler and the authors Kate DiCamillo and Judy Blume – writing forewords for the new editions.
Cleary, a self-described “fuddyduddy”, said there was a simple reason she began writing children’s books.
“As a librarian, children were always asking for books about ‘kids like us’. Well, there weren’t any books about kids like them. So when I sat down to write, I found myself writing about the sort of children I had grown up with,” Cleary said in a 1993 Associated Press interview.
She was named a Living Legend in 2000 by the Library of Congress. In 2003, she was chosen as one of the winners of the National Medal of Arts and met George W Bush. Her books have won awards, and she is lauded in literary circles far and wide.
She produced two volumes of autobiography for young readers, A Girl from Yamhill, on her childhood, and My Own Two Feet, which tells the story of her college and young adult years up to the time of her first book.
“I seem to have grown up with an unusual memory. People are astonished at the things I remember. I think it comes from living in isolation on a farm the first six years of my life where my main activity was observing,” Cleary said.
Cleary was born Beverly Bunn on 12 April 1916 in McMinnville, Oregon, and lived on a farm in Yamhill until her family moved to Portland when she was school-age. She was a slow reader, which she blamed on illness and a mean-spirited first-grade teacher who disciplined her by snapping a steel-tipped pointer across the back of her hands.
“I had chicken pox, smallpox and tonsillitis in the first grade and nobody seemed to think that had anything to do with my reading trouble,” Cleary told the AP. “I just got mad and rebellious.”
By sixth or seventh grade, “I decided that I was going to write children’s stories,” she said.
Cleary graduated from junior college in Ontario, California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where she met her husband, Clarence. They married in 1940; Clarence Cleary died in 2004. They were the parents of twins, a boy and a girl born in 1955 who inspired her book Mitch and Amy.
Cleary studied library science at the University of Washington and worked as the children’s librarian at Yakima, Washington, and post librarian at the Oakland army hospital during the second world war.
Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and inspired Japanese, Danish and Swedish television programs based on the Henry Huggins series. A 10-part PBS series, Ramona, starred Sarah Polley. The 2010 film Ramona and Beezus featured Joey King and Selena Gomez.
Cleary was asked once what her favorite character was.
“Does your mother have a favorite child?” she responded.