So when I sat down to write, I found myself writing about the sort of children I had grown up with,” Cleary said in a 1993 Associated Press interview. Well, there weren’t any books about kids like them. “As a librarian, children were always asking for books about ‘kids like us’. Photograph: Anthony McCartney/APĪlthough she put away her pen, Cleary re-released three of her most cherished books with three famous fans – the actor Amy Poehler and the authors Kate DiCamillo and Judy Blume – writing forewords for the new editions.Ĭleary, a self-described “fuddy-duddy”, said there was a simple reason she began writing children’s books.

When I started writing I found that I was thinking more about my typing than what I was going to say, so I wrote it longhand,” she said in March 2016.Ĭleary’s best-known character was Ramona Quimby, who she said was not a mirror of herself.

In all, there were eight books on Ramona between Beezus and Ramona in 1955 and Ramona’s World in 1999.Ĭleary wasn’t writing recently because she said she felt “it’s important for writers to know when to quit”. We played hopscotch and jump rope and I loved them and always had scraped knees.” “At the age of Ramona, in those days, children played outside. “I was a well-behaved little girl, not that I wanted to be,” she said. She kept appearing in every book,” she said in a March 2016 telephone interview from her California home.Ĭleary herself was an only child and said the character wasn’t a mirror. “All the children appeared to be only children so I tossed in a little sister and she didn’t go away. Ramona, perhaps her best-known character, made her debut in Henry Huggins with only a brief mention. Among the Henry titles were Henry and Ribsy, Henry and the Paper Route and Henry and Beezus.

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