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Classic Authors: Beverly Cleary

© Susan Jensen

For the past 50 years, Beverly Cleary has written about ordinary children having ordinary experiences. Her stories contain no melodrama, little description, and certainly no overt morality lessons. The novels feature clear, strong language and believable characters. In short, she has written books that children want to read. In fact, she says, "I simply write the books I wanted to read as a child." By listening to her inner child, Beverly Cleary creates stories that children love to read. Her books have never gone out of print; in fact, most of them are considered children's classics.

Beverly's life began on April 12, 1916, in McMinnville, Oregon. Her parents, Chester Lloyd and Mable Atlee Bunn, ran an 80-acre farm in Yamhill, Oregon, and were active in the small community. Although her parents gave her little physical affection, Beverly enjoyed a happy childhood. She roamed the farm freely by day and listened to her mother's stories at night. Since Yamhill did not yet have a library, Mable Bunn told her daughter remembered fairy tales and experiences from her own childhood. In later years, Mable helped to get a library for Yamhill, and became its librarian. Beverly, like most people in Yamhill, owned few books. As a result, reading was not one of her girlhood hobbies.

That changed, however, when the Bunn family moved to Portland, Oregon, in the early 1920s. Beverly's parents enrolled her in a local school, thus beginning her formal education. Used to the freedom of farm life, she did not take well to sitting still in a classroom and taking orders from a stern teacher. To make matters worse, the other students read much better than she did. When she contracted smallpox, she missed school, and became even farther behind. She hated reading the boring primers, and had almost written off books forever, when she finally discovered Lucy Fitch Perkins's The Dutch Twins. She devoured the book, realizing that she loved to read. It was not long before she had read every children's book in the city's library. As she grew, books became her way to escape from her strained relationship with her mother and the financial hardships the Depression brought.

Beverly also began writing at an early age. She published a book review in the Oregon Journal, won an essay contest and wrote interesting papers for school. After reading one of her essays, Beverly's teacher advised her to become a children's author when she grew up. Beverly took the challenge.

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