R.I.P. Beverly Cleary

[Big Magilla]

Sorry to say never heard of her. Was she the equivalent of Enid Blyton?

It seems her books were as popular in the U.S. as Blyton's were in the U.K. decades earlier but I'm not familiar with them either.

The difference between the two authors seems to be that Cleary was a genuinely nice person while Blyton was a monster in real life. The 2009 British TV movie of her life starring Helena Bonham Carter as the woman loved other people's children but not her own and who drove her husband to drink while using a syndicate to write her later books seems like something that should be better known.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1397265/reference

[Reza]

Sorry to say never heard of her. Was she the equivalent of Enid Blyton?

[Sonic Youth]

Obviously not a literary light,

Bite your tongue, sir! Her books were a cornerstone of my childhood. Ramona Quimby will be remembered as her greatest creation, but I treasured the Henry and Ribsy books, as well as Ellen Tebitts and Otis Spoford. And I'm getting reaquainted all over again as my daughter is taking her books on.

[dws1982]

She's as big a name in children's literature as McMurtry is in modern American literature. If you grew up in the United States between, say, 1960 and 2000, there's a very good chance you read her books or had a teacher read some to you. My sisters read all of her Ramona books and even saw the movie together when it came out in 2010. Her Ralph S. Mouse books may not have been the first chapter books I ever read, but if they weren't they were close to it, and I read all three. (I think a teacher read the first one to us, and then I got all three and read them myself.)

[gunnar]

My dad was an elementary school teacher and had all of the Henry Huggins and Beezus books and I enjoyed reading them when I was a kid back in the 1970s.

[Big Magilla]

Seems to have been a nice lady, but I never heard of her. Henry Huggins wasn't a thing when I was in grade school.

[Mister Tee]

Obviously not a literary light, but some kind of attention should be paid to a writer whose books endured across generations. I read most of the Henry Huggins books when I was in grade school -- a lo-o-o-ng time ago -- and apparently enough of her work is still being read that there was a movie in 2010.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/26/us/bever ... index.html