It’s the birthday of three American authors who have each sold bazillions of books: Tom Clancy (1947 – 2013), whose military/espionage thrillers have sold over 100 million copies; Scott Turow (b. 1949), whose courtroom thrillers have sold over 30 million copies; and Beverly Cleary (b. 1916), whose children’s books about Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and others have sold over 91 million copies.

Cleary is 102 years old today. (My Great Aunt Edna’s older than that. But 102 is pretty good.) She was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in 1916 in McMinnville, Oregon, and lived on a family farm near Yamville. Yamville was too small for a library, so Cleary’s mother had the State Library send books and acted as librarian in a room over the bank. When Cleary was six, her parents sold the farm and moved to Portland. The transition was rough for Cleary. She had a cruel first grade teacher who punished her for daydreaming, and she was put in the low reading circle. (Cleary remembers thinking, “My mother always read to me, so why should I learn to read?”) Thanks to a kind local librarian, she learned to read by third grade. Cleary hated Dick and Jane type stories, and hated anything didactic; if an author was trying to teach her to be a good girl, she would close the book.

Cleary earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938 and a masters in library science from the University of Washington in 1939. While working as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, the next year, Cleary met a little boy who complained that he couldn’t find any books that related to his life. Several years later Cleary wrote her first book, Henry Huggins (1950), with that little boy in mind. It was an instant bestseller.

Ramona, Cleary’s most popular character, was created almost by accident as the foil to her big sister Beezus; the two first appear in a Henry Huggins book but Ramona busted out with her own series, starting with Ramona the Pest (1968). Ramona is imaginative, stubborn, and creates many extremely funny difficulties for the adults in her life, as when she puts her kindergarten teacher on the spot by asking how Mike Mulligan managed to go to the bathroom while digging the basement of the town hall. While Cleary is never sentimental, she created for Ramona a cozy, warm family life—perhaps because her own mother was cold and unaffectionate. (In college, Cleary’s mother wouldn’t give her money for glasses because she was afraid it would ruin her looks. Boo.)

In 1940, Cleary eloped with Clarence T. Cleary against her parents’ wishes; the two later had twins and were together until Clarence’s death in 2004. In 2000, the Library of Congress gave Cleary the Living Legend award. She’s also won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (1975), the National Book Award in children’s fiction (1981), and the Newbery Medal (1984), and in 1995, Portland, Oregon, opened the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden for Children not far from Klickitat Street, where the Henry Huggins and Ramona books are set.

Have an imaginative Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.