Author of the week: Beverly Cleary

last updated 8 January 2015

For Beverly Cleary, a memorable career as a children’s author began with a question, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. Some 70 years ago, the Portland, Ore., native was working as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Wash., when a young patron came to her with a gripe. “A little boy faced me rather ferociously across the circulation desk and said: ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’” recalls Cleary. “He had me there, because there weren’t any. The books I grew up with…so many children lived in England and had nannies and pony carts, and I just wanted grubby neighborhood kids.” That insight sparked Cleary’s desire to write books herself. She spent the next 50 years crafting tales about “ordinary American children,” from Henry Huggins to “Ramona the Pest.”

At age 95, Cleary has stopped writing, said Pamela Paul in The New York Times. Yet her books continue to fly off the shelves, a fact that doesn’t exactly surprise her. She always mimicked what she wanted as a reader. “If I suspected the author was trying to teach me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.” Her success may lie in the fact that she writes to children as if they were adults. Though times have changed, Cleary believes children haven’t. “Children want the same things my generation wanted,” she says. “A home with loving parents and children to play with, in safe neighborhoods.” Who’s her favorite of her characters? “It must be Ramona,” she says.