Ramona (novel Series) - Background

Background

The Ramona books grew out of Cleary's earlier Henry Huggins series and take place in the same neighborhood. In the Henry Huggins books Beezus was one of Henry's friends, and her younger sister Ramona was generally a pest to Henry, Beezus and the other children.

"It occurred to Cleary (while writing Henry Huggins) that all of the characters she had created thus far had no brothers or sisters. 'Someone should have a sibling,' she wrote in My Own Two Feet, 'so I tossed in a little sister to explain Beezus's nickname. When it came time to name the sister, I overheard a neighbor call out to another whose name was Ramona. I wrote in 'Ramona,' made several references to her, gave her one brief scene, and thought that was the end of her. Little did I dream, to use a trite expression from books of my childhood, that she would take over books of her own'".

In 1955, after finishing three Henry books, Cleary wrote Beezus and Ramona, a novel in which Beezus was the central character. The plot revolved around fourth grade Beezus' frustrations with her four-year-old sister. Then in 1968, having concluded the Henry Huggins series, Cleary returned to focus on the two sisters in Ramona the Pest. It became the foundation book of the Ramona series. As publisher, writer and reviewer Anita Silvey says, "It was almost inevitable that Cleary would publish a series of books about this boisterous yet appealing character."

Ramona the Pest, like the remaining books in the series, is written from Ramona's point of view. In Ramona the Pest Ramona enters kindergarten. The succeeding books follow her as she grows up and advances through school, usually at the rate of one grade over two books. Written from the 1950s through the 1990s, dates aren't mentioned in the books, and the children are designed to appeal to real children in any time period. The last Ramona book, Ramona's World, was published in 1999, 15 years after the previous one.