Beverly Cleary

1916– AUTHOR UNITED STATES

Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.

—BEVERLY CLEARY

“Class, Abendroth’s Grocery is sponsoring a writing contest for the best animal essay. The winner gets a two-dollar prize.” Beverly Bunn’s fourth-grade teacher smiled encouragingly at the class.

“Two dollars?” marveled Beverly. “That’s a lot of money just for writing.”

She could hear her fellow Fernwood Elementary students chattering about which animal they would write about. It sounded like everyone planned to enter the contest.

Beverly wanted her essay to stand out and wondered which animal to write about  .  .  .  Cat? No, too common. Giraffe? Too exotic. Beaver? Yes, that’s it! Beavers were everywhere in Oregon and fascinating creatures by any measure.

That evening, Beverly grabbed a stack of green scratch paper—the leftover check-printing paper from the bank where her father worked—and she wrote down everything she knew about beavers: They are mostly active at night  .  .  . Their rear feet are webbed, making them excellent swimmers  .  .  .  They are second only to humans in how much they change their environment to suit their needs  .  .  . 

Beverly worked on her essay for hours.

The next day, she raced to the store.

“You’re the first to turn it in,” Mr. Abendroth told her. “Good work!”

Now she just had to be patient and wait for the contest to end.

Days passed, and she tried not to think about it. Finally, the end of the contest arrived, and Beverly ran back to Abendroth’s.

“Who won? Who won?” she asked.

Mr. Abendroth scratched his chin, “Hmm, let me think  .  .  .”

Beverly held her breath and crossed her fingers.

“You won, Beverly!” he said with a laugh. “And here’s your two-dollar prize.”

“Really?” Beverly couldn’t believe it. “I wrote the best essay?”

“Well, you were the only student who turned anything in. But your beaver essay was really good.”

Beverly practically floated back to school. She was a writer! A real writer!

Beverly went on to write many, many more stories and to win many, many more prizes. But that day in the fourth grade, she learned one of the most valuable lessons of her entire writing career: you’ve got to try. “Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying,” she wrote, remembering that day.1 And thank goodness she did keep trying, or we wouldn’t have all of her incredible stories and characters: Ramona, Beezus, Henry, Ribsy, Socks, and Ralph S. Mouse.

Beverly wanted to be a writer her entire life. She was born Beverly Bunn, the only child of a schoolteacher mother and farmer father. She spent her first six years living on an eighty-acre family farm in Yamhill, Oregon, where she was very happy. As a girl, she had a lot of freedom in the country to roam around on her own. She picked cherries and apples, searched for abandoned bird nests, and got good and dirty. “My parents were much too hardworking to be concerned about a little dirt,” she said.² She also loved listening to the stories her mother read to her. Beverly always loved a good story.

One of Beverly’s favorite farm activities was tripping chickens! She used a long pole with a hook on the end to snare their feet. Her mother scolded her for it, but Beverly went right on tripping chickens.

When she was six, Beverly’s family moved to Portland—the big city. She loved her new neighborhood, which was full of children to play with.

We made stilts out of two-pound coffee cans and twine and clanked around the block yelling “Pieface!” at children on the next street and bloodying our knees when the twine broke.  .  .  . We hunted for old bricks among the hazelnut bushes and pounded them into dust in a game we called Brick Factory. With scabs on my knees and brick dust in my hair, I was happy.3

Beverly was also thrilled to start first grade at Fernwood Elementary. She was especially excited about learning to read, but the reality was a bitter disappointment. She was used to the exciting stories her mother read to her, but her school readers were filled with boring stories about John and Ruth and Rover. “We wanted action. We wanted a story,” she said.⁴ Beverly hated them. After she missed a week of school due to chicken pox, she returned to find she was in the lowest reading group: the Blackbirds. Beverly was mortified!

Beverly still has her copy of this much-hated first reader, filled with tear-stained pages.

And her overly strict teacher, Miss Falb, soon made her hate the rest of school as well. When Beverly daydreamed, Miss Falb smacked her hands with a bamboo pointer or stuck her on a stool facing the corner. “Soon, every school day became a day of fear  .  .  . I began to beg to stay home from school.”5 Beverly nearly failed first grade.

Lucky for us, Beverly never forgot this challenging first year of school, and many of her real-life dramas made it into her most beloved Ramona stories: playing Brick Factory, being teased about her doll Fordson-Lafayette named for a tractor (Ramona’s doll is named Chevrolet in the books), and having to sing about the baffling “dawnzer lee light.”⁶ Her new neighborhood in Portland became the setting for many future books—Klickitat Street and Fernwood Elementary (now called the Beverly Cleary School).

Beverly was so afraid of Miss Falb that one day she wet her pants. She was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom!

In the second grade, Beverly got a kinder teacher, and life improved immensely. She learned to read and gained back her self-esteem. By third grade, she actually loved reading and spent a lot of time at the library, but she was still disappointed with her book choices. Most books at that time were about children who acted noble and learned something. Beverly knew kids weren’t really like that. “I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school  .  .  .  I think children like to find themselves in books.”⁷

Around this time, Beverly began writing. She entered and won the essay contest for Abendroth’s Grocery. And when a local newspaper, the Oregon Journal, offered a free book to any child who wrote a book review, Beverly jumped in. She earned a copy of The Story of Doctor Doolittle (which she loved!) and got her picture printed in the paper, along with her book review. “Suddenly I was a school celebrity,” she remembered.⁸ By sixth grade, a teacher told Beverly that her essays were so good that she should become a professional writer.

That was Beverly’s dream, but her mother had other ideas. “ ‘You must have some other way of earning a living,’ ” Beverly recalled her mother saying. “So I became a children’s librarian—the next best thing.”⁹

During the Depression, her family was poor (like most families), so there was no money for college. Luckily, a relative in California offered to let Beverly live with them, which allowed her to qualify for free in-state college tuition. Beverly went to college and then got her graduate degree in library science at the University of Washington. In 1939, she began her first job as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington.

Beverly loved working as a librarian but still had trouble finding books with characters that kids could identify with. And books for children who didn’t like to read—the same problem she’d had with books when she was a kid. There weren’t enough funny stories about regular kids. She vowed that she would write the kinds of stories she knew kids wanted.

At the bookstore, Beverly often dealt with local authors who became upset that their books weren’t better displayed or selling better. Beverly buttered them up, asking them to autograph their titles. But she made a promise to herself that if she ever wrote books, “[she] would never behave in bookstores like Berkeley’s local authors.”11

But first romance got in the way. Back in California, she met and fell in love with Clarence Cleary. Again, Beverly’s mother wasn’t crazy about her plans (to be with Clarence) because he practiced a different religion than their family. So they eloped in 1940. (And they were married for sixty-four happy years, until Clarence died.)

After the wedding, Beverly and Clarence moved to northern California. Beverly worked part-time in a bookstore, where she learned priceless lessons on which books sold best and what helped them sell. And during World War II, Beverly worked as a librarian at an army base and then at an army hospital. When the war was over, Beverly lost her job and became a housewife, a career that didn’t suit her well: “Life as a housewife  .  .  .  was a letdown after the stimulating work in the hospital.”¹⁰ But the boredom had a positive effect: Beverly started to seriously think about writing a book for children.

The first time she attempted to write, however, she had an experience common to many writers: the terror of the blank page. “When I sat down at my typewriter and stared at the paper I had rolled into it, the typewriter seemed hostile, and the paper remained blank. The longer I stared, the blanker it seemed.”12 She delayed for weeks, instead learning how to braid rugs and carve wood. She made rugs for every room and carved trays, a sewing box, even a mask of a Greek god!

Finally, in 1949, she discovered a ream of typing paper left in the linen closet by the house’s former owner. She took it as a sign:

“I guess I’ll have to write a book,” she told her husband.

“Why don’t you?” he asked.

“We never have any sharp pencils,” she reasoned.

The next day Clarence brought her a pencil sharpener.¹³

Beverly struggled to come up with a story idea. She remembered her own childhood on the farm in Yakima and later in Portland; she remembered the children she grew up with, the games they played, and the dramas they endured. And then she remembered a story told to her by a coworker at the army hospital about her children taking their dog on a stressful streetcar ride. Beverly took that nugget of an idea and wrote her first book about a boy named Henry and his dog, Ribsy.

Beverly often baked bread while she wrote. She would mix the dough and then let it rise while she wrote a little. Then she’d take a break and go knead the dough for a while. Then back to the writing. And at the end of a good writing day, she had a new chapter or two plus a fresh-baked loaf of bread!

Henry and Spareribs was rejected the first time Beverly sent it to publishers—it was too short to be a novel—but she made some changes suggested by an editor, and the next publisher she sent it to accepted it. Retitled Henry Huggins, this first book was a hit, and the rest is literary history. Beverly went on to write some of the most beloved children’s books of all time—classics like Beezus and Ramona, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Ramona the Brave, and Socks.

Beverly has sold eighty-five million copies of forty-one books and has won every award possible in children’s literature: a National Book Award, a Newbery Award, a Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for her “lasting contributions to children’s literature,” a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment of Arts, and a Living Legend Award from the Library of Congress.14

The reluctant reader who dared to dream of being a writer, Beverly never gave up on it. She spent the rest of her life doing what she loved: writing about real kids. She happily and successfully wrote books for fifty years, and in April 2016, she turned one hundred years old!

If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

—BEVERLY CLEARY

HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?

I will rock the world by creating cool graphic novels. I love to write and draw, and I read graphic novels all the time. My favorites are by Raina Telgemeier, Doug TenNapel, Faith Erin Hicks, and Kazu Kibuishi. My graphic novels will be funny, exciting, and have strong female characters to be role models for girls. I plan to go deeper into this by turning my art and words into comics.

FIONA MCCANN AGE 12