Beverly Cleary, ’39, brings words to life for children everywhere
Beverly Cleary
Beverly Cleary, prolific and widely honored author of children’s books including the six-book Ramona Quimby series, doesn’t necessarily have the happiest memories of school. That includes the UW library school from which she graduated in 1939.
“I mostly remember the campus being cold and windy,” she recalls about the year she spent at the UW obtaining a bachelor’s in librarianship after graduating from the Univ. of California in 1938. “It was the depression and we were all having a hard time financially. I lived in a room in a private home with green walls and lavender woodwork.”
Today this winner of the John Newbery Medal lives in sunnier, warmer Carmel Valley, Calif., surrounded, presumably, by a considerably more tasteful decor. But, regardless of the quality of her Seattle experience, the experience of Seattle’s children—and that of children everywhere—is warmer and wiser because of her life’s work.
Since 1949—when she shoved an old kitchen table into an unused room in her home and began to write—Cleary has produced about three dozen books. Her protagonists—including the resourceful Henry Huggins and the rambunctious Ramona Quimby—are among the most recognizable in children’s literature and have been translated into 14 languages.
The key, she believes, is her effort to write for the “inner child” which she feels remains unchanged despite “a great change in children’s taste” over the last several decades. Laura Ingalls Wilder and E.B. White were favorite authors among young readers in her early writing years, Cleary observes. “But now Stephen King seems to be on top.”
When Cleary was six her family moved to Portland and she had her first encounter with public schools. “It was quite a shock to me,” she recalls about walking into a classroom and facing a “cruel teacher” who, for reasons she has never understood, one day whipped her hands with a metal-tipped bamboo pointer. Her early school experiences changed her from a lively personality, like her fictional Ramona, into someone more like the shy, quiet title character of her book Ellen Tebbits.
“The stories I write are the stories I wanted to read as a child,” she explains. And although she didn’t start writing until 1949—after working as a professional librarian in Yakima and Oakland, Calif.—it was in childhood that her dream of becoming a writer was born.
The UW School of Library and Information Science named Cleary its 1975 distinguished alumna. Her host of other honors include the prestigious Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw in 1984. Two titles, Ramona and Her Father and Ramona Quimby, Age 8, have been named Newbery Honor Books. She’s a recipient of the American library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and was the 1984 United States nominee for the Hans Christian Anderson Award. Her work has been the basis of a PBS series and television programs in Japan, Denmark and Sweden.