What Beverly Cleary’s Legacy Means for Children Today
All children need to see themselves in the books they read. Beverly Cleary understood this at a time when many others didn’t.
“I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written and go on to be readers all of their lives.” ~ Beverly Cleary
I don’t know many people my age (52 next week) who didn’t grow up loving Beverly Cleary’s imaginative and playful books for children. Her iconic characters — Ramona Quimby, her big sister Beezus, their friend Henry Huggins, and Henry’s scrawny dog Ribsy — felt as real to many of us as our actual friends. Generations of girls recognized themselves in spunky tomboyish Ramona — although, I admit I wasn’t among them. Even though I liked Ramona just fine and had all the books, I really did think she was a pest and I related much more to studious Beezus. We would have been BFFs, I’m sure of it. (Imagine my horror when my mother later told me I’d almost been named Mona. No disrespect to any actual Monas out there who may be reading this.)
Beverly Cleary died on Thursday at age 104, leaving behind a literary legacy achieved by few others. Her books sold more than 85 million copies and were translated into 29 languages. She was a children’s librarian and wrote her books because, as a young girl, there weren’t any “funny stories about the sort of children I knew.”
