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Beverly Cleary, the famous children’s author whose memories of her childhood in Oregon have been shared with millions of people through Ramona and Beezus Quimby and Henry Huggins, has passed away. She was 104 years old.
Cleary editor HarperCollins announced Friday that the author died Thursday in northern California, where she had lived since the 1960s. No cause of death has been given.
Trained as a librarian, Cleary didn’t start writing books until her early thirties when she wrote Henry Huggins, published in 1950. Children around the world loved the adventures of Huggins and her neighbors Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby and her younger sister, Ramona. They live in a healthy place downstairs from the house on Klickitat Street – a real Portland, Oregon street, the town where Cleary spent much of his youth.
Among the titles “Henry” were Henry and Ribsy, Henry and the Paper Road, and Henry and Beezus.
Ramona, perhaps her most famous character, made her debut in Henry Huggins with only a brief mention.
“All the kids seemed to be just kids, so I threw out a little sister and she didn’t leave. She continued to appear in every book, ”she said in a March 2016 telephone interview from her home in California.
Cleary herself was an only child and stated that the character is not a mirror.
“I was a well-behaved little girl, not who I wanted to be,” she says. “At the time of Ramona’s age, the children were playing outside. We played hopscotch and jump rope and I loved them and I still had scraped knees.
In all, there were eight books on Ramona between Beezus and Ramona in 1955 and Ramona’s World in 1999.
Cleary wasn’t writing recently because she said she felt “it’s important for writers to know when to quit.”
“I even got rid of my typewriter. It was fun but I hate to type. When I started writing I found that I was thinking more about my typing than what I was going to say, so I wrote it by hand, ”she said in March 2016.
Although she put her pen away, Cleary reissued three of her most cherished books with three famous fans – actor Amy Poehler and authors Kate DiCamillo and Judy Blume – writing forewords for the new editions.
Self-proclaimed “fuddy-duddy” Cleary said there was a simple reason she started writing children’s books.
“As a librarian, children always asked for books on ‘children like us’. Well, there weren’t any books about kids like them. So when I sat down to write, I found myself writing about the kind of kids I grew up with, ”Cleary said in an Associated Press interview in 1993.
She was named a living legend in 2000 by the Library of Congress. In 2003, she was chosen as one of the laureates of the National Medal of Arts and met George W. Bush. Her books have won awards and she is praised in literary circles around the world.
She has produced two autobiography volumes for young readers, A Girl from Yamhill, about her childhood, and My Own Two Feet, which tells the story of her college and young adults until the time of her first delivered.
“It seems to me that I grew up with an unusual memory. People are amazed at the things I remember. I think it came from living in isolation on a farm for the first six years of my life where my main activity was observation, ”Cleary said.
Cleary was born Beverly Bunn on April 12, 1916 in McMinnville, Oregon, and lived on a farm in Yamhill until her family moved to Portland when she was of school age. She was a slow reader, whom she attributed to illness, and a petty first-year teacher who disciplined her by slamming a steel-tipped pointer on the back of her hands.
“I had chickenpox, smallpox and tonsillitis in the first year and no one seemed to think it had anything to do with my reading problems,” Cleary told the AP. “I just went mad and rebellious.”
In sixth or seventh grade, “I decided I was going to write children’s stories,” she says.
Cleary graduated from college in Ontario, California, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she met her husband, Clarence. They married in 1940; Clarence Cleary died in 2004. They were the parents of twins, a boy and a girl born in 1955 who inspired his book Mitch and Amy.
Cleary studied librarianship at the University of Washington and worked as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, and post-librarian at Oakland Military Hospital during World War II.
His books have been translated into over a dozen languages and have inspired Japanese, Danish and Swedish television programs based on the Henry Huggins series.
Cleary was asked what her favorite character is.
“Does your mother have a favorite child?” she answered.
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