“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids. That’s what I wanted to read about when I was growing up. I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school. And in my childhood, many years ago, children’s books seemed to be about English children, or pioneer children. And that wasn’t what I wanted to read. And I think children like to find themselves in books.” — Beverly Cleary
Beverly Cleary, beloved children’s author, has just died at the venerable age of 104.
Like so many other children, then and now, Beverly Cleary’s books were huge to me growing up. I read all the “Ramona” books, and also all the “Henry” books. My favorite was Ramona Forever (I still remember that moment with the mirror – haven’t read the book since I was a child). It’s so touching to me to see my nieces and nephews also falling in love with her books.
The obit on NPR is really good and this part struck me:
In her autobiography, A Girl From Yamhill, she wrote about clamping around on tin can stilts and yelling “pieface!” at the neighbor. She was an only child, who grew up in Portland during the Depression and still remembered when her father lost his job.
“I was embarrassed,” she recalled. “I didn’t know how to talk to my father. I know he felt so terrible at that time that I just — I guess I felt equally terrible. And I think adults sometimes don’t think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.”
Cleary used her crystal-clear recall to capture the tribulations of young children exquisitely in her books.
What a fascinating and complicated memory, a child understanding the pain of her father, and absorbing the pain, but not knowing how to say “I know you’re hurting, Dad” because you are a child.
Cleary’s books are filled with insightful moments like that. In fact, when you read them as an older person, outside the realm of childhood, the adults start to take on more shape. You begin to see that THEY are having complicated full lives too.
One of the interesting things is the cross-generational aspect of this, at least in my family, but considering the tributes I’ve seen it’s true for others. She started publishing books for children in 1950. Long before I even arrived on the planet. But the Ramona and “Beezus” series were a staple of my childhood, and then down the line: I’d outgrow reading them and then my younger brother and sister would start them up and then they’d outgrow them and my youngest sister would start… Almost like a rite of passage. And now THEIR children love these books!
And now it’s so funny when my nieces start explaining Ramona to me, as though the books were published yesterday … I want to say “Believe me, kiddo, I know all about Ramona.” But of course I don’t because everyone has to discover those books for themselves.
Beverly Cleary started out as a librarian (so many writers begin this way and as a librarian’s daughter I am HERE for it), and she noticed a trend: little boys kept asking her where they could find books about boys – regular boys like themselves. There weren’t many out there (see the quote above), and so she decided to write one. She wrote Henry Huggins, which was published in 1950 and was an instant hit. People are still discovering this series and the Ramona series. It doesn’t matter that it takes place “back then”, because for a child it’s all the same stuff. Parents … friends … worries … problems … school … all seen through the perspectives of children trying to understand – or rebel against – the often incomprehensible behavior of adults. An eternal subject.
Cleary’s books have never gone out of print.
My niece is named Beatrice. Her little brother calls her “Beezus”. Beverly Cleary’s is a living legacy.
