Beverly Cleary at 100: A salute

When we first meet Ramona Quimby, she’s only 4 years old and already showing signs of greatness.

She can secretly summon 15 friends to her house without her mother suspecting a thing — at least until the children start arriving on the doorstep, expecting a party. She can ruin two birthday cakes in a single day, turn the house upside down with only a box of apples, and make herself the center of attention anywhere, any time — with or without the paper Easter Bunny ears she proudly dons for, say, a trip to the library.

And back in 1955, when she made her title-character debut in “Beezus and Ramona,” the little girl with big brown eyes and a talent for trouble was just getting started.

Over the next six decades, she would appear in seven more books, a Hollywood movie and libraries from coast to coast. Amy Poehler would celebrate her girl power. Generations of schoolchildren would embrace her as one of their own. Judy Blume characters would walk in her footsteps.

“Ramona was kind of groundbreaking,” says Diane Foote, curator of the Butler Children’s Literature Center at Dominican University.

“She wasn’t really that likable a character. The book was ‘Ramona the Pest,’ and she’s a pest — but somehow she resonated. She resonated among kids who had little sisters like that, and she resonated with kids who maybe also act like that themselves. Until then, you needed almost an heroic — or at really likable — main character, and this was really the first kids’ book to show kids in all their flaws, and all the good, the bad and the ugly. I think Judy Blume’s books come out of that. I think it opened the door for books such as ‘Harriet the Spy.’ ”

Not bad for a kid with a green-haired doll and questionable impulse control.

And not bad for Beverly Cleary, the beloved author of the Ramona books, the Henry Huggins books, “The Mouse and the Motorcycle,” and the Newbery Award-winning “Dear Mr. Henshaw.” Cleary, who turned 100 on April 12, has created books that have remained outrageously alive and effortlessly entertaining despite the transition from phone booths to cellphones, Elvis Presley to Taylor Swift, Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama.

What makes Cleary so great, so lasting, so likely to be read in the decades to come?

The simple answer is the kids she creates.

Before she was a children’s book author, Cleary was a librarian leading storytime in Yakima and her books are a master class in the action and humor that keeps a fidgety young audience transfixed. She’s never short on mischief, tension and surprise, and she pulls off great comic feats with the simplest of tools.

Cleary spent her early years on a farm in Yamhill, Ore., then moved with her parents to Portland when she was 6. In first grade, she was placed in the lowest reading group, the Blackbirds, according the Oregon Public Broadcasting documentary “Discovering Beverly Cleary.”

By third grade, Cleary had caught up; she became an avid reader who dreamed of becoming a writer. She became a children’s librarian, but in 1949, when she was in her 30s, living with her husband, Clarence, in California, she retreated into a spare room, determined to finally write, according to the documentary.

“I expected to write about the maturing of a sensitive female,” she says in the documentary. But when the words didn’t come, she thought of a little boy who had confronted her when she was a librarian in Yakima: “Where are the books about kids like us?” he said.

Soon she was writing “Henry Huggins.” She continued writing after she became the mother of twins — Marianne and Malcolm — in 1955.