Everyday is a party here at the Free For All, but today is one of those days where we pull out the extra-sparkly confetti and the really fancy party hats…because it’s the 100th birthday of beloved children’s author, librarian, and literacy advocate Beverly Cleary!
Beverly Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in McMinnville, Oregon on this day in 1916. She wasn’t a natural born reader, and spent the first two years of school in a remedial reading group, until her school librarian helped her find books she enjoyed reading. Their mutual love of reading fostered a life-long friendship, and by sixth grade, her teachers told her that she should become a children’s author, based on her essays and love of reading.
Instead, she became a children’s librarian herself, after eloping with her husband, Clarence in 1940, and delighted in helping children find books that would engage and challenge them. In fact, it was precisely because there were so few of those books on the shelf that Cleary took to writing. As she explained to The New York Times in a 2011 article, after encountering a book where a puppy said: “Bow-wow. I like the green grass.”
“No dog I had ever known could talk like that…What was the matter with authors?”
She realized she could do better…and she did.
More than 40 books and 90 million copies later, Beverly Cleary has become one of the most well-known and beloved children’s authors of the century. From her outlandish and spunky Ramona Quimby to the intrepid Ralph S. Mouse, to the heartbreakingly honest letters found in Dear Mr. Henshaw, Cleary has spent a lifetime treating children like intelligent readers, and giving them characters to whom they can relate, and whose stories they could just plain enjoy. As Cleary noted of her own childhood reading experiences, “If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book”.
Instead, she gave us characters who were–and remain–real, rambunctious, and beautifully empathetic, especially because of their mistakes, flaws, and boundless energy. As Cleary noted to The Atlantic, “I have stayed true to my own memories of childhood, which are not different in many ways from those of children today. Although their circumstances have changed, I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed.”
It turns out, she was 100% right. In an online post from The Oregonian today, librarians, authors, and teachers from around the state have taken the opportunity today to thank Beverly Cleary for inspiring them, as well as their students, to keep reading, exploring, and adventuring. As one librarian from Cleary’s former grade school (where the library has been rename in her honor) explains,
Students at Beverly Cleary School come to the library all smiles, and leave grinning as they clutch the books they can’t wait to read. Most all of them know that Beverly Cleary is a famous author who grew up in the same neighborhood they are growing up in. They also know that Henry, Ramona, Beezus and the other characters from Cleary’s books played in the park that they play in. In fact, many of them confuse Beverly Cleary with her fictional character, Ramona. When the younger students sit on the story steps in the library to listen to me read a story, some of them believe Ramona sat on those same steps to hear her librarian read to her.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. If you would like to hear from the great Ms. Cleary herself, check out this interview below from the Today show that ran last month:
Then, come in and check out some of Cleary’s books for yourself. For those who grew up reading her, it will be a perfect way to remember your childhood. For those who haven’t had the pleasure–trust me, it’s never too late!
And, on a personal note, I would like to publicly thank Beverly Cleary, and Ramona Quimby, for teaching me how to tell time.