Beverly Cleary, beloved author who chronicled schoolyard scrapes and feisty kids, dies at 104

Beverly Cleary was a new librarian in Yakima, Wash., when, as she later recalled, “A little boy faced me rather ferociously across the circulation desk and said, ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’ ”

She was stumped. There were many volumes about precocious British tots with “nannies and pony carts,” she said, but none that would appeal to “grubby neighborhood kids” like the boy before her — or to the adventure-seeking girl she had once been.