The first Beverly Cleary book I remember reading, recommended to me by my wise and thoughtful mother, was “Ellen Tebbits.” Mom had read it herself as a girl. It’s about Ellen, an eight-year-old Oregonian who takes ballet lessons and goes to elementary school. Until I reread “Ellen Tebbits” this weekend, some thirty-five years later, I remembered details hazily, but with a particular intensity of feeling: Ellen’s embarrassment about having to wear woolen underwear, and her fear of people noticing it at ballet; a troublemaker named Otis Spofford, who wore spurs on his sneakers; an eraser-clapping scene that had a pivotal role in a friendship; Ellen and her friend having matching homemade dresses with a monkey print and sashes; something terrible about the dresses, or the sashes, that caused a blowup; a scene at ballet in which Ellen discovers that her friend is also wearing horrible woolen underwear, and is embarrassed about it, just like Ellen. Instant kinship, the end of loneliness. I remember thinking very powerfully about friendship as I read this book, with its quietly foreign details, and feeling riveted and moved. I didn’t have that particular kind of friendship, a sashes-and-dresses friendship, but I didn’t need one in order to understand it. (I was more of a Beezus-Ramona hybrid with a few beloved local Henrys.) Rereading “Ellen Tebbits,” I was pleased to be reminded of good details I’d forgotten about, like a dramatic beet-pulling scene and Ellen’s role in a play as a substitute rat. The book’s emotions, however, I’d remembered vividly—they were indelible.

As a kid, once I finished “Ellen Tebbits,” I began looking for Cleary’s other books at the library. I was amazed by what I found: some two dozen novels, a whole community of Portland kids. (Cleary gave many of us our first impressions of Oregon, as well as of pinking shears, bluing, davenports, and other exoticisms.) There was a book about Otis Spofford, which I read next. I was fascinated to learn that Ellen’s tormentor was just a boy, a restless boy looking to liven things up, with his own interests and feelings. I read my way down Klickitat Street, delighting in getting to know the whole neighborhood: Henry Huggins, his dog Ribsy, Henry’s friend Beezus, Beezus’s little sister Ramona. Cleary paid respect to all these characters and the things they cared about by devoting titles to them: “Henry Huggins,” “Henry and His Paper Route,” “Henry and Ribsy,” “Ribsy,” “Henry and the Clubhouse,” “Henry and Beezus,” “Beezus and Ramona,” “Ramona and Her Mother,” “Ramona and Her Father,” and so on. In her writing, Cleary sees children with an amused eye, and a loving and understanding one. I never got the feeling that she was talking down to us—in fact, she was helping us figure something out. She was one of us, just grown up.

Cleary turns a hundred on Tuesday, giving us a chance to reflect and celebrate while she is still around to know about it. Of course, she already knows how we feel. She has sold millions of books, published two memoirs, and won awards; the elementary school she attended in Portland was named after her in 2008; there are statues of Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, and Ribsy in Grant Park, in Portland, a few blocks from Klickitat Street. Her birthday has been designated Drop Everything and Read Day. Cleary now lives in a Northern California retirement home. She is still her good old self, telling us, for example, that she didn’t turn a hundred on purpose and that she will be celebrating with carrot cake—just the kind of thing you’d expect her to say.

People have been talking about how her books lure kids into a thrilling world of independent reading, which is still true. Cleary was an early pioneer of emotional realism in children’s writing, respecting young readers enough to write about the feelings provoked by the joys and embarrassments of the world as it was, for children and their allies, animals. Henry’s love of Ribsy, Ralph S. Mouse’s love of riding a motorcycle and his joy in figuring out how to make it go, Ramona’s consternation about her father’s smoking, Beezus’s fears about not having an imagination—these things are as much a part of American childhood as the things we actually did in our childhood. They helped so many of us understand who we are and what the world is.

Cleary is perhaps best loved for her books about Ramona Quimby, in whom she found her funniest details and most tender lessons. Ramona, like Superfudge, in Judy Blume’s books, is the younger, crazier sibling of a reasonable protagonist, a lovable scene-stealer. She rides a tricycle around the living room while playing a single note on her harmonica, and then ruins Beezus and Henry’s checkers game; she makes tin-can stilts with a friend and clatters around the neighborhood joyfully singing “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” But though Ramona is often up to some mild form of noisy mischief, her emotional struggles and childhood realizations and confusions are every bit as vivid as her boisterousness; she is not just a figure of fun. In childhood, the humor that results from your actions—making a NO SMOKING sign that looks like NOSMO KING, or singing about the dawnzer lee light instead of the dawn’s early light, or getting burrs stuck in your hair and not wanting to explain why you put them on your head—is very often the result of your best efforts to get along in the world as you understand it. If people laugh, it can step on your dignity a bit. Ramona bore these slights sometimes with reserve and sometimes with indignation. When Ramona, in the at-times-unbearably-sad “Ramona and Her Father,” gets the idea to become a child actor in order to help support her family when her father is laid off, she doesn’t tell anybody about it. She just starts practicing by acting chipper and cute, like kids on commercials, which annoys her family. Then she makes a crown for herself, like a kid has on TV, out of burrs. The scene in which her father patiently and kindly copes with Ramona’s burrs might just finish you off.

Cleary wrote wonderfully about animals, whether lightly anthropomorphized, in “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” and its sequels, or not, in “Socks” and “Ribsy.” Socks is a cat whose owners seem to love him a bit less after they have a baby; I've thought of him often over the years. I reread “Socks” last week, marvelling at a scene whose details I’d filed away: a grandmotherly babysitter shows up, brushes Socks’s coat, affectionately calls him Skeezix, and lets him sprawl on her lap. Read it in adulthood, and I dare you not to weep for Skeezix.

For all these reasons, Cleary’s books are addictive for young readers. Learn to read just well enough, and off you go, like Ralph S. Mouse going pb-pb-b-b-b and zooming down the hallway of the Mountain View Inn. A couple of months ago, a friend who lives in Massachusetts told me that her six-year-old son had begun to read that way: hours and hours, lost in a world of books. He seemed a good age for “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” or Ramona, so I recommended Cleary to my friend, who was glad to be reminded. Now the boy is hooked on her books. He reads them on his own, and my friend also reads them aloud to him and his rambunctious five-year-old brother. These kids, she said, “go from kissing each other and snuggling in a pile to beating the shit out of each other, and back again, in minutes.” Reading them the last chapter of “Beezus and Ramona,” she told me, was an incredible experience.