Beverly Cleary, the famous author of Children, whose childhood memories of Oregon were shared with millions of people, including Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins, has died. He was 104 years old.
Cleary’s editor, HarperCollins, announced Friday that the author died Thursday in Northern California, where she has lived since the 1960s. No cause of death has been reported.
Trained as a librarian, Cleary did not begin writing books until the early 1930s, when she wrote “Henry Huggins,” published in 1950. Children around the world came to love the adventures of Huggins and neighbors Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, Beatrice. “Beezus” Quimby and her younger sister, Ramona. I live in a healthy setting on Klickitat Street – a real street in Portland, Oregon, the city where Cleary spent much of his youth.
The titles “Henry” included “Henry and Ribsy,” “Henry and the Way of the Paper,” and “Henry and Beezus.”
Ramona, perhaps her best known character, debuted in “Henry Huggins” with only a brief mention.
“All the kids seemed to be just kids, so I dumped a little sister and she didn’t leave. She kept appearing in every book,” she said in a March 2016 phone interview from her home in California.
Cleary herself was an only child and said the character was not a mirror.
“I was a well-behaved girl, I didn’t want to be,” she said. “In Ramona’s time, in those days, children played outside. We played basket and jump rope and we loved them and we always had our knees scratched.”
In all, there were eight books about Ramona between “Beezus and Ramona” in 1955 and “Ramona’s World” in 1999. Others included “The Pestful Ramona” and “Ramona and Her Father.” In 1981, “Ramona and her mother” won the National Book Award.
Cleary did not write recently because he said he felt “it is important for writers to know when to quit.”
“I even got rid of the typewriter. It was a nice one, but I hate typing. When I started typing, I found that I was thinking more about my typing than what I was going to say, so I wrote it with long hand “she said in March 2016.
Although he took off his pen, Cleary relaunched three of his most prized books, with three famous fans writing words ahead for the new editions.
Actress Amy Poehler wrote on the front of the movie “Ramona Quimby, 8 years old”. author Kate DiCamillo wrote the opening for “Mouse and Motorcycle;” and author Judy Blume wrote the preface for “Henry Huggins.”
Cleary, a self-described “fuddy-duddy,” said there was a simple reason he started writing children’s books.
As a librarian, children always asked for books about “children like us.” Well, there were no books about children like them. So when I started writing, I found myself writing about the kind of kids I had. grew up with, “Cleary said in a 1993 Associated Press interview.
“Dear Mr. Henshaw,” the moving story of a lonely boy who corresponds to an author of children’s books, won the 1984 John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature. “It came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced,” she told National Public Radio as she approached her 90th birthday.
“Ramona and Her Father” in 1978 and “Ramona Quimby, Age 8” in 1982 were named Newbery Honor Books.
Cleary ventured into fantasy with “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” and the sequels “Runaway Ralph” and “Ralph S. Mouse.” “Socks”, about a cat’s struggle for acceptance when its owners have a child, is said from the point of view of the pet itself.
It was named the Living Legend in 2000 by the Library of Congress. In 2003, she was chosen as one of the winners of the National Medal of the Arts and met with President George W. Bush. She is praised in literary circles everywhere.
Tim Sloan / AFP through Getty
She has produced two volumes of autobiographies for young readers, “A Girl from Yamhill,” about her childhood, and “My Own Two Feet,” which tells the story of college and young age until the time of her first book.
“I seem to have grown up with an unusual memory. People are amazed at the things I remember. I think it comes from the fact that I lived isolated on a farm for the first six years of my life, where my main activity was observation.” , said Cleary.
Cleary was born in Beverly Bunn on April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Oregon, and lived on a farm in Yamhill until her family moved to Portland when she was of school age. She was a slow reader, blamed for illness, and a bad-tempered first-grade teacher who disciplined her by holding a steel-tipped pointer to the back of her hands.
“I had chickenpox, smallpox and tonsillitis in first grade, and no one seemed to think it had anything to do with my reading problems,” Cleary told AP. “I just got angry and rebelled.”
By sixth or seventh grade, “I decided I was going to write stories for kids,” she said.
Cleary graduated from junior high school in Ontario, California and the University of California at Berkeley, where she met her husband, Clarence. They married in 1940; Clarence Cleary died in 2004. It was the parents of the twins, a boy and a girl born in 1955 who inspired the book “Mitch and Amy”.
Cleary studied librarianship at the University of Washington and worked as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, and as a librarian at Oakland Army Hospital during World War II.
Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have inspired Japanese, Danish and Swedish television programs based on the Henry Huggins series. A 10-part PBS series, “Ramona,” starred Canadian actress Sarah Polley. Actresses Joey King and Selena Gomez appeared in the 2010 film “Ramona and Beezus”.
Cleary was once asked who her favorite character was.
– Does your mother have a favorite child? she replied.