Ramona Quimby is one of the great creations of 20th century children's literature, a character who comes across as a creature from hell when she's intruding into someone else's story but whose disruptive behavior makes perfect sense when you're seeing the world from her point of view. Morrowĭon't get me wrong: I'm not knocking the Ramona books. It's a wonder Henry managed to build that clubhouse without someone calling Child Protective Services on his parents. The '50s books, on the other hand, seem downright subversive, with all those little kids running around unsupervised so much of the time, launching elaborate projects without so much as telling a grown-up, let along asking permission. In the '70s it may have seemed bold for Ramona's mom to become the breadwinner for a spell, but now we're more likely to notice how much housework still falls on her shoulders anyway (including some sewing tasks that a similarly situated family today might be more likely to outsource entirely). But looking back now, it's the later books that sometimes feel a little behind-the-times, and not just because those commercials aren't so current anymore. I haven't read those.) The Ramona books had a more contemporary feel, with references to recent TV commercials and with plots that dealt with unemployment, shifting gender roles, and other weighty issues. (And indeed, Cleary wrote a few Leave it to Beaver tie-in novels too. As an elementary schooler, I had found Cleary's books from the '50s enormously entertaining but also thought them a little square, as though they'd been dunked in a vat of Leave it to Beaver wholesomeness. You notice a lot of things when you revisit your childhood reading three decades later. Cleary, a librarian who dreaded didactic literature, started writing them because a boy asked where he could find books about " kids like us." I've read them all, in most cases twice: first as a boy in the late 1970s and early '80s, and then as a dad in the Obama era. The earlier books in the series tend to be written from Henry's point of view, and the later ones from Ramona's there is also one where the protagonist is Ramona's sister and one told from the POV of Henry's dog. The most famous are her stories about Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and the other boys and girls of Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon. Beverly Cleary, who turned 100 yesterday, has written more than three dozen books for children over the course of her life.
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