The Ramona writer who helped kids fall in love with books

Beverly Cleary 1916–2021

Beverly Cleary was working as a librarian in Yakima, Wash., when a little boy marched up to her and asked, “Where are the books about kids like us?” Cleary realized she’d had the same thought as a girl in the 1920s; there had been plenty of books about posh British kids with “nannies and pony carts” but none that would appeal to “grubby neighborhood kids.” So she set out to fill that void—and would sell more than 85 million books in the process. The hero of her first book, 1950’s Henry Huggins, was an adventurous third-grader with hair “like a scrubbing brush” and a skinny dog named Ribsy. The book was full of everyday wonders and trials that can achieve an outsize importance in a young mind— hunts for night crawlers in the park, struggles over how exactly to spend a silver dollar—and it spawned five sequels and a spin-off series featuring Cleary’s best-loved character, Ramona Quimby. The spunky younger sister of Henry’s friend Beezus, Ramona became an outright star with 1968’s Ramona the Pest, in which she gave her credo: “A littler person sometimes had to be a little bit noisier and a little bit stubborn in order to be noticed at all.”

“An only child,” Cleary was born “on her family’s 80-acre farm near McMinnville, Ore.,” said the Los Angeles Times. Her mother, an aspiring writer, founded a library in nearby Yamhill. When

Cleary was 6, hard times forced her father to sell the farm and move the family to Portland, where he worked as a bank security guard before being laid off during the Depression. Though Portland would become the setting for many of her books, Cleary said she struggled to adapt to city life. On the farm she’d been “free and wild,” and it was a shock to be “shut up in a classroom.” Cleary “was a slow reader” at first, said the Associated Press, but in third grade she was flipping through a children’s novel when she had a revelation. “I discovered I was reading,” Cleary said, “and enjoying it.” Having fallen in love with books, she studied English at the University of California, Berkeley and then library science at the University of Washington. Cleary found “both comedy and drama in the smaller incidents of life, but she did not shy away from weighty themes,” said The New York Times. In 1977’s Ramona and Her Father, Ramona tries to persuade her dad to quit smoking— hanging a sign at home reading “NOSMO KING”—a habit he indulges after losing his job. To hook her own young son on reading, Cleary created a new character for 1965’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle: Ralph S. Mouse (the S stands for “smart”), a daredevil rodent who befriends a human boy.

For 30 years “Cleary answered her fan mail herself,” said NPR.org. Two letters from different children asking her to write a book about a boy whose parents are divorced would inspire Dear Mr. Henshaw. The 1983 novel—constructed as a series of letters between a lonely sixth-grader and his favorite writer—won the Newbery Medal, the top prize for children’s literature. No matter what she wrote, Cleary was always guided by the child she had once been. “That little girl,” she said, “prevents me from writing down to children, from poking fun at my characters, and from writing an adult reminiscence about childhood instead of a book to be enjoyed by children.”