Beverly Cleary Turns 104 On Sunday - A Look At Ramona Quimby Author's Life

Apr 11, 2020 by apost team

Many people will remember being young and enyoing the Ramona Quimby or Henry Huggins book series. The author of all those well-loved children's books is Beverly Cleary, who turns 104 this Sunday, April 12.

Despite the fact that her first novel was published in 1950, Cleary's works are still cherished and read nowadays by young audiences all over the globe. Her funny and down-to-earth style of writing has been translated into 25 languages and her characters have been praised for being especially relatable for children.

Born in 1916, Cleary was an only child and spent her early childhood years in rural Yamhill, Oregon. Her family moved to Portland when she was six, exchanging the countryside for the inner city. When she started school, the later author didn't like reading at first. In an interview with the National Post, she stated that she rather liked having her mother read to her and saw no reason to start reading on her own. This changed in third grade:

“I was looking through The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins,” she recalls, “and I discovered I was reading — and enjoyed it.”

apost.com

Once she found her love for reading, though, she never lost it. Cleary went on to study at the University of California at Berkeley where she gained a Bachelor's degree in English. She managed to master her classes despite not having the glasses she needes to correct her poor sight, as she confessed to National Post in 2016. Her mother denied her money for glasses, fearing it would make her look unseemly. Thankfully, her mother finally relented and Cleary clearly wasn't worse off, as she married her longtime boyfriend in 1940. Following her studies, she took up work as a school's librarian.

Cleary started writing her children's books because she wanted young children to have books with characters they could relate to. As her website states: 

She decided that someday she would write the books she longed to read but was unable to find on the library shelves: funny stories about her neighborhood and the sort of children she knew.

And so Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby and alle the other characters of her many books were born. Aside from several awards, her writing also secured her a National Medal of Arts in 2003 and was named as a Library of Congress Living Legend. In 2010, the first book of the Ramona Quimby series was adapted into a movie. She published the last of her 42 books, Ramona's World, in 1999 and has been enjoying her retirement since then. 

Do you have fond memories of reading a Beverly Cleary book when you were young or reading it to your children? Leave us a comment and tell us all about it as you pass this article on to another fellow reader!