I do have very clear memories of childhood,' Cleary said.

And I think adults sometimes don't think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.'Ĭleary used her crystal clear recall to capture the tribulations of young children exquisitely in her books. I know he felt so terrible at that time that I just - I guess I felt equally terrible. She was an only child, who grew up in Portland during the Depression and still remembers when her father lost his job. In her autobiography A Girl From Yamhill, she writes about clamping around on tin can stilts and yelling 'pieface!' at the neighbor.

People who called her a pest were always bigger, so they could be unfair.Ĭleary's memories are cinematically detailed. No matter what others said, she never thought she was a pest. 'I'm not acting like a pest, I'm singing and skipping,' said Ramona, who had only recently learned to skip with both feet. In the opening chapter of Ramona the Pest, Ramona responds to her big sister: Mischievous, spunky and a hater of spelling, Ramona would be the first to tell you she's not a pest - no matter what anyone (especially her older sister Beezus) says. Ramona Quimby, the most famous of all of Cleary's characters, was unforgettable. Henry Huggins was a hit upon first printing, but her readers wanted to hear more about the little girl who lived just up the street. There weren't any, so she sat down and wrote Henry Huggins, her first book about a regular little boy on Klickitat Street in Portland. By the 1940s she'd become a children's librarian in Portland, Ore., and she remembers boys in particular would ask her: 'Where are the books about kids like us?' Cleary was still a young girl when she decided to become a children's book author.

Her writing style - clear, direct, uncomplicated - mirrored the author's own trajectory. And I think children like to find themselves in books.' And in my childhood, many years ago, children's books seemed to be about English children, or pioneer children. 'I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school. That's what I wanted to read about when I was growing up,' Cleary told NPR's Linda Wertheimer in 1999.

'I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids. Generations of readers tore around the playground, learned to write in cursive, rebelled against tuna fish sandwiches, and acquired all the glorious scrapes and bruises of childhood right along with Ramona.Ĭleary's simple idea - to write about the kids in her own neighborhood - ensured that her books have never gone out of print. Cleary was the creator of some of the most authentic characters in children's literature - Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Children's author Beverly Cleary died Thursday in Carmel, Calif.

Ramona quimby and henry huggins