It is no joke when I say that the author that has most impacted my writing and reading life is Beverly Cleary. Reading her books as a child was magical. Rereading them with my children, and often on my own just for fun, I now realize that Mrs. Cleary had a gift for distilling important characteristics, emotional journeys and complicated plots down to their essence in such succinct style that her books can be enjoyed by all ages, including 50-year-olds.
Beverly Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in Oregon on April 12, 1916. She was an only child and lived her early life on a farm before her family moved to Portland (where she lived several streets over from Klickatat, where the Quimbys would later take up residence). She attended college in California and became a children’s librarian. After a short time in Yakima, Washington, she moved to California where she married, worked, and raised twins. She began writing in 1950 and wrote more than 30 books for children and young adults. She passed away on March 25, 2021, at the age of 104.
As early as elementary school, teachers were praising Beverly’s creativity and stories, and experiences from her youth later appeared in her books: her mother started the first library in Yamhill (EMILY’S RUNAWAY IMAGINATION), money troubles and her father’s unemployment (RAMONA AND HER FATHER), years of not-so-successful dance lessons (ELLEN TEBBITS) and her reluctance to learn to read (MITCH AND AMY).
Beverly Cleary’s first memoir, A GIRL FROM YAMHILL, was published in 1988 and my parents gave me a copy for my birthday that same year (I am horrified to admit that I just finished reading it last week for this post. Why did I wait to read this delightful book?). What surprised me the most was not the fact that Mrs. Cleary writes about her own life in the same practical manner in which she narrates her fictional books, it is that she writes about her parents being rather distant and undemonstrative in a way that is the complete opposite of the families depicted in her professional works. Knowing more about Mrs. Cleary’s upbringing adds another layer of complexity to her work, and I wonder if perhaps she was rewriting her own story as she chronicled the Quimbys, the Tebbits, the Spoffords, the Hugginses.
My favorite story in all her books is “The Extra-good Sunday” in RAMONA QUIMBY, AGE 8: Ramona and her sister Beezus have quarreled with their parents about what Mrs. Quimby served for dinner (tongue!). As punishment, the girls are to prepare dinner the following evening. I won’t spoil the rest, but it remains to this day one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read. I encourage you to seek it out - or listen to it here - and let me know what you think.
Side note: The entire Ramona Quimby collection is available on audiobook (check your library or Overdrive) and perfectly narrated by the extraordinary Stockard Channing. I have no trouble at all thinking that Ramona grew up to be Rizzo. Beezus of course, would be Sandy.
In her second, equally charming, memoir, MY OWN TWO FEET, Mrs. Cleary recounts her college years, her marriage to Clarence Cleary, and her early career as a librarian before writing what was to be her first book, HENRY HUGGINS, in 1950. If I didn’t already love Mrs. Cleary, the fact that she was a natural writer with no formal training would have cemented her status as my personal hero. She simply wrote what she knew children wanted to read. As she recounts in the chapter entitled “A House, a Cat, a Letter:”
“Writing without research, bibliography, or footnotes was a pleasure. So was rearranging life. If I needed a character or an incident, all I had to do was pull it out of my memory or imagination without searching a card catalog or waiting in a crowd of pressured students at a circulation desk. What freedom!”
If a book makes a child a reader, it becomes more than a book; it becomes legacy. Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary, and thank you. You did exactly as your young library patrons asked; you wrote books about kids “just like us,” stories that your legions of fans recognized, cherished, and passed on to future generations.
Want more? Visit https://www.beverlycleary.com/about for a lovely 15-minute interview with Beverly Cleary herself.