It also included a number of neighborhood kids, including Beatrice 'Beezus' Quimby and her younger sister Ramona. This initial work kicked off a series that lasted 14 years, and included numerous foibles with Henry's pooch Ribsy. It was a school librarian who suggested that she should become a writer of books for boys and girls. Her family moved to Portland, where she attended elementary and high school. Born in McMinnville, Oregon, in 1916, Beverly Bunn lived on a farm in Yamhill. In 1950, at age 34, she published her first book, Henry Huggins, featuring illustrations by Louis Darling, Jr. Beverly Cleary (1916-2021) Beverly Cleary is Oregon’s most famous author of children’s books. With a keen sense of what young readers were looking for, she turned to the typewriter herself. She found work as a children's librarian in Yakima, Washington, then at an Army base in Oakland during World War II, and at a book shop in Berkeley.

After some time at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met her husband of 64 years, she received a degree in library science at the University of Washington.

The Grant Park section, with its folksy-sounding Klickitat Street, informed the corpus of her work. The Oregon-born writer is credited with being among the first children's authors to eschew fantastical or adventure tales, and focusing on ordinary settings, finding conflict and wonder within the interiors of average, middle class youngsters, or, as she put it ' grubby kids.' She was 104 years old.Ĭleary lived with her family on a farm until she was six, when her father got a job at a Portland bank. Beverly Cleary, the children's book author beloved by generations of young readers, has died in Carmel Valley, California, according to reports.

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