When Beverly Cleary died at age 104 in 2021, most tributes to this beloved writer focused on just one of her indelible creations: Ramona Quimby, a good-hearted but incorrigible and frequently irritating little sister. Ramona is central to a small fictional universe of kids on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon, where Cleary lived from age six until she went to college. A librarian before she began writing fiction, Cleary took up the craft after a boy asked her where to find the books “about kids like us”—neither the perfectly well-behaved children in didactic storybooks, nor the hero progenies of youngsters’ adventure fiction, but imperfect suburban middle-class kids with familiar concerns. On realizing that her library didn’t have what her patron was seeking, Cleary resolved to write those books herself.
The impulse behind that young library-goer’s question rings true to anyone who read voraciously as a child, and that wish to see oneself reflected on library shelves has only gained urgency over recent decades. Early-grade English teachers and librarians promote books that serve as “mirrors” (reflections of one’s own world) and ones that serve as “windows” (entry points into another’s world). One book served powerfully for me as both, but it wasn’t one about those upbeat, slightly sitcom-y Klickitat kids. That book was Cleary’s 1983 Newbery Award winner Dear Mr. Henshaw. To revisit it as an adult is to understand anew how it felt to see aspects of my upbringing mirrored on the page—and to see a window into who I might become.
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In retrospect, I can easily link my favorite books as a child to defining features of my adult reading life. Given that I loved Ellen Raskin’s whip-smart solve-it-yourself 1978 mystery The Westing Game, of course I would love postmodern puzzle boxes from Paul Auster or Ishmael Reed. I see now that my enjoyment of George Selden’s 1960 The Cricket in Times Square, about an insect that chirps classical music to subway commuters, prepared me for the midcentury urban energy of Saul Bellow and Grace Paley.
But Dear Mr. Henshaw is something else altogether. It’s about a solitary kid, unpopular at school, brooding on his parents’ divorce, aware of his father’s love for him but frustrated by his absence. Revisiting it, after connecting the dots of Raskin to Auster, Selden to Paley, I wonder: was Beverly Cleary—creator of Ramona Quimby, that delightful pest who gets in low-stakes comic trouble for wiping her fingerpaints on the neighbor’s cat—secretly the Raymond Carver of chapter books? For one book at least, yes.
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Dear Mr. Henshaw’s narrator is Leigh Botts, a middle schooler living in California’s Great Central Valley with his mother. The book starts as letters to Boyd Henshaw, Leigh’s favorite writer, and an unlikely correspondence between the two begins after Leigh sends Henshaw a list of questions for a school project. Henshaw writes obliging responses but encloses a list of questions for Leigh to answer in turn. Initially annoyed that his literary hero has essentially assigned him homework, Leigh drags his feet answering those questions, but when he does, he writes with touching sincerity and modesty. “I am just a plain boy,” he says. “This school doesn’t say I am Gifted and Talented […] I am not stupid either.” He calls himself “sort of medium” and recounts what he knows of his father’s work as a trucker and his mother’s plan to take nursing classes at the community college.
As soon as Leigh gets his mother talking about her youth, the Carveresque signifiers of so-called “dirty realism” crop up: the trailer park, the small-town girl who marries too young, trying to leave home because her father drinks too much. And the loneliness endemic to Carver appears through Leigh, though his solitude’s weight gets tempered by aching compassion. When Leigh reads Henshaw’s newest book, about a mother bear and two cubs, he can’t help wondering where the father’s run off to, leading him to reflect, “I worry because something might happen to Mom. She is so little compared to most moms, and she works so hard.” Leigh’s world remains stubbornly bittersweet. His small victories come with strings attached.
Nearly every day, someone steals Leigh’s lunch from his class’s coatroom. His classmates know that his mom works for a caterer, so Leigh brings better food from home than most. His solution: he wires a burglar alarm into his lunchbox. To his delight, it works—but to his horror, he realizes at lunchtime that he can’t get into his own lunch without setting off the alarm. With nothing else to do, he opens his lunch loudly and draws confused notice, which turns into bemused praise when he explains to everyone what he’s built.
As a child, I found this funny. A resourceful kid deals with life’s foibles creatively. As an adult, it’s nearly unbearable. This child with so little in his life that isn’t “medium” has something that makes his school day special stolen from him repeatedly. And when he admirably finds a way to solve that problem himself, doing so gets him what he least wants: attention.
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As a kid, I could see my love of reading reflected in Leigh’s, but I could also see ways that we weren’t the same at all. Consequently, this book was both mirror to my experience and a window into another’s. The differences between us felt clear: where Leigh’s parents were divorced, mine have now been married for over fifty years. Leigh is reticent, guarded, happy to fly largely under the middle-school radar; I was a more extroverted kid, a people-pleaser with good grades who didn’t mind attention at all.
But Leigh and I sensed, at an age when we couldn’t yet describe it, that our worlds were shaped by what we and our loved ones lacked. Leigh lives in what others kindly call a “garden cottage” but which he calls “a really little house.” He overhears his mother’s conversations with friends and notices “their problems which are mostly men, money, kids and landlords”—financial pressures all. Leigh and I had all our needs met growing up, unlike some, but we shared a nascent recognition that some of our classmates’ houses were way bigger than ours. Their parents’ cars looked newer. They had passports, and they used them.
I grew up the child of two public school teachers—excellent providers like Leigh’s mom—and never truly lacked for anything. But I realize now that I shared with Leigh an understanding that budgetary limitations meant certain extravagances were probably not in the cards. Summer vacations would happen, but generally only to places in reasonable driving distance. Going to college was never in doubt, but financial aid decisions would matter as much as admissions. Indeed, my parents confided in me, well after I finished college, that for years their greatest fear was that they would die in an accident—one that would not just leave me and my brothers parentless but would reveal to my grandparents how much credit card debt they had taken on to keep the household going.
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If Dear Mr. Henshaw succeeds as an unlikely junior example of the then-hip minimalist lower-middle-class fiction of the early eighties, it also works as the story of an emerging writer, and one that offered me a crucial window into the basic power of creativity.
Early in the book, after answering Henshaw’s list of questions, Leigh concludes that writing “wasn’t so bad when it wasn’t for a book report or a report on some country in South America or anything where I had to look things up in the library.” Encouraged by Henshaw to start a diary, Leigh commits to a journal that comprises the bulk of the book. Its entries begin “Dear Mr. Pretend Henshaw” until Leigh feels comfortable just writing for himself. And keeps writing and writing.
When his father sends him money, Leigh starts saving up for a typewriter, honing his craft via the diary, and eventually entering a creative writing competition at school. Unsure what to do until the deadline, he dashes off a remembrance of a trip in his father’s truck. He’s amazed to win an honorable mention, and even more amazed when the “Famous Author” who speaks at the award ceremony compliments his work directly: “You wrote like you, and you did not try to imitate someone else. This is one mark of a good writer. Keep it up.” “A real live writer called me a writer,” Leigh repeats to himself, in awe that it’s really true, shocked that this time he’s attracted good attention.
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Late in Cleary’s book, Leigh revisits the Henshaw book that he has loved since second grade: “I picked up Ways to Amuse a Dog and read it for the thousandth time. I read harder books now, but I still feel good when I read that book. I wonder where Mr. Henshaw is.”
I feel a readerly protectiveness over Leigh. I read harder books now, too, and I wonder where Leigh is. I hope he’s doing okay. He seems so fragile in Dear Mr. Henshaw, so I feel thankful for Cleary’s 1990 sequel Strider—a lesser book, honestly, but one I appreciate for its gentle reassurances that Leigh will be fine. Re-reading Strider recently, the simplicity and directness of one passage stopped me cold, mainly because it reassures the reader that Leigh, with typical modesty, finds a place for himself. Having carved out a niche in high school through running (of course he doesn’t go for a team sport), he reflects, “Now I have three friends: Barry, Geneva, and Kevin. I am part of the track crowd. I belong.”
Even more poignant to me is how Leigh sticks with writing, developing a confident voice. When a sternly grammarian English teacher scolds him for including too much nonstandard language, Leigh retorts that her rules shouldn’t apply to the dialogue he’s written. He refuses to “correct” his work because “that will make it incorrect […] I was writing about people who don’t speak correctly.” His next English teacher challenges him to write a story consisting solely of nouns and verbs. Leigh produces an energetic prose poem about a track meet, but the novel concludes, “Sorry, Mr. Drexler, sometimes adjectives and adverbs are needed to say what I mean. But in my future, if I become a writer I’ll try to keep the fat out of my prose.”
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The best parts of that ending are Leigh’s self-assured references to my future and my prose. The sentence equates the two. Ultimately, Leigh will own whatever lies ahead for him, just by taking control of his language. He now sees writing as a way to overcome some limitations and assert himself. Leigh won’t just write about his future; his writing will create his future. Because that’s what those people who love the written word do.
With the devotion of any young reader imprinting on a formative book, I read Dear Mr. Henshaw dozens of times. Somewhere in the pre-internet newsprint ether, there exists an early nineties edition of my hometown newspaper in which I appeared in a feature titled, “What do kids want to do when they grow up?” I claimed with certainty that I wanted to write children’s books—a goal I haven’t had since. The only plausible explanation for this is that I, like Leigh, wanted to be Boyd Henshaw.
This book showed me, as a child, that books didn’t simply happen—they were made by people who cared about the written word, and those people were once children who loved the written word.
Anything I’ve written for pleasure or self-expression since reading Dear Mr. Henshaw is indebted to Cleary (and Leigh) for demonstrating that this thing of arranging existing words in new combinations is a thing that people can simply decide to do.
They can do so after reading about ways to amuse a dog, or about crickets in Times Square, or about mixed-up kids in California, or about what we talk about when we talk about love. They can have parents with money problems and old cars.
And with a little luck (and revision), they too can belong.
Matthew Luter is a writer, teacher, and crossword constructor in Jackson, MS. He is the author of Understanding Jonathan Lethem (U of South Carolina P, 2015) and the co-editor, with Mike Miley, of Conversations with Steve Erickson (UP of Mississippi, 2021). His work has appeared in journals including American Book Review, Critique, Genre, and Orbit. He is a founding board member of the International David Foster Wallace Society.