Beverly Bunn was born on an Oregon farm in 1916, but the family subsequently moved to Portland, where she grew up, experiencing the Depression during her teenage years. Although she loved reading, she was initially assigned to the poor-readers’ group when she began attending school; a part of the problem, Jim Trelease writes, was that she found the classroom reading matter “so dreadfully dull.” She was influenced to read again when she encountered a series of books about twins from different countries that actually had a story.
She moved to California to attend college and met her future husband while attending the University of California at Berkeley. She then returned north, studying to be a librarian at the University of Washington, before being married in 1940.
While working as a librarian and earlier in her life, Cleary had wondered at why so many children’s books presented a child’s life differently from the way she experienced it. She wanted books that spoke about ordinary children’s lives, and in 1950 wrote and published Henry Huggins, an attempt to do just that; the book was a success and started her on a writing career that has led to more than 30 books in the past half century.
Best known of her works are the Ramona series, which follow the everyday adventures of a little girl first introduced as a minor character in a book about Henry Huggins, and a set of three fantasies about an intelligent, talking mouse. She received the Newbery award in 1984 for Dear Mr. Henshaw, a novel told through letters and diary entries by a sixth-grade boy, Leigh Botts, who uses writing to deal with the pain of his broken home.
July 31, 2007