Beverly Cleary

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Beverly Atlee Cleary (née Bunn, 1916) is a writer who writes children's and young adult fiction.

Since her first book was published in 1950, one of America's most popular living authors, 91 million copies of her books have been sold around the world.

Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse are two of Cleary's most popular characters, often in middle-class families, and she has been lauded as one of the first writers of children's fiction to explore emotional realism in her stories.

Cleary received the National Medal of Arts, honoring her lifetime contributions to American literature, as well as the Association for Library Service to Children's Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.

Since she was born in Grant Park, Portland, Oregon, many statues of her most popular characters were erected.

Early life

Beverly Atlee Bunn was born on April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Oregon, to Chester Lloyd Bunn, a fisherman, and Mable Atlee Bunn, a schoolteacher. In her early childhood, Cleary was an only child and lived on a farm in rural Yamhill, Oregon. She was born a Presbyterian. Her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where her father had worked as a bank security officer when she was six years old.

Cleary's move from living in the country to the city was difficult, and she failed in school; in the first grade, her teacher placed her in a group for struggling readers. "The first grade was divided into three reading groups — Bluebirds, Redbirds, and Blackbirds," the author explained. I was a Blackbird. To be disgraced as a Blackbird. I wanted to read but couldn't"."

Cleary's reading skills increased with some work, but she eventually found reading tedious, complaining that many stories were dull and unsurprising, and asking why authors often did not write with humor or about ordinary people. During Cleary's third-grade year, however, she discovered herself enjoying The Dutch Twins, a book by Lucy Fitch Perkins about ordinary children's adventures. The book was an epiphany for her, and she began to spend a lot of time reading and at the library afterward. Based on essays she had written for class assignments, a teacher suggested that Cleary should become a children's writer by the sixth grade.

Cleary graduated from Grant High School in 1934, earning lower tuition fees than four-year universities, something many students required during the Great Depression, with aspirations of becoming a children's librarian. She was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1938. She spent two years at Chaffey. Cleary acquired her tuition while studying as a seamstress and a chambermaid. She was one of the first tenants of women's cooperative Stebbins Hall and first met her future husband, Clarence Cleary, at a school dance, which Cleary characterized as "two of the most exciting years of my life." She graduated from the University of Washington with a second bachelor's degree in library science and accepted a year-long position as a children's librarian in Yakima, Washington, 1939. Cleary, a Roman Catholic, was opposed by her parents, so the pair eloped and married in 1940. They settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, after World War II. Malcolm and Marianne, both of 1956, gave birth to twins. She lived in Carmel Valley Village, California, from the 1960s to the present.

Later life

Clarence Cleary's husband, Clarence, died in 2004. On April 12, 2016, she celebrated her 100th birthday. Cleary died at the age of 104 in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, on March 25, 2021.

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Career

She worked as a children's librarian in Yakima, Washington, until 1940, and then as the post librarian at the US Army Hospital in Oakland, California, from 1942 to 1945. She worked at Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley before deciding to become a full-time writer for children.

Cleary, a children's librarian, empathized with her young patrons, who had a difficult time finding books with characters they could identify with, and she was unable to find enough books to warrant that they would love. Cleary, after a few years of making recommendations and doing live storytelling in her role as librarian, decided to start writing children's books about characters that young readers would relate to. "I believe in the'mission spirit' among children's librarians,'" Cleary said. Kids are entitled to books of literary value, and librarians are so vital in encouraging them to read and finding books that are appropriate."

Henry Huggins (1950), the first in a series of fictional chapter books about Henry, his dog Ribsy, his neighborhood friend Beezus, and her little sister Ramona. Cleary drew inspiration from the times she wrote stories for children during Saturday afternoon story hours in Yakima, Japan. Henry Huggins is a book about people living ordinary lives, based on Cleary's childhood experiences, the children in her neighborhood's growing up, as well as children she encountered while working as a librarian. Though Morrow, the first publisher she sent it to, had initially rejected it, and Cleary had included the characters of Beezus and Ramona when revising it.

Beezus and Ramona was the first book to center a story on the Quimby sisters, which was published in 1955. A kindergarten girl's grandmother was asked by a publisher to write a book about a kindergartener. Cleary refused because she hadn't attended kindergarten, but she later changed her mind after the birth of her twins.

Cleary wrote two memoirs, one about her childhood, entitled A Girl from Yamhill (1988), and one about her college experience and an adult novel entitled My Own Two Feet (1995). Cleary said, "I've had an amazing career" during an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2011.

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