EchoBlog

Beezus came first. When Beverly Cleary began dreaming up what would become her beloved children’s book series, she started the Quimby family with just one child. “Then one morning as I wrote,” Cleary explains in her 1996 memoir “My Own Two Feet,” she realized that a sibling was needed, “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.” So began the life of one of the most memorable characters in children’s literature.

Over the course of more than 40 years, eight novels and many editions, feisty Ramona zoomed, stomped, jumped and shouted across the pages. Cleary, who died March 25 at age 104, worked with several illustrators — Louis Darling, Alan Tiegreen, Joanne Scribner, Tracy Dockray and Jacqueline Rogers — who captured Ramona’s high jinks in a variety of styles.

The drawings are an integral part of the Ramona books and in many ways as unforgettable as the stories they punctuate. Ramona’s look changed over time, but, as Anna Katz notes in the preface of the 2020 book “The Art of Ramona Quimby” (Chronicle Books, $40), many “Ramona Quimby readers remember the illustrations they grew up with as the illustrations ... but the range of illustrations points to the fact that the Ramona stories themselves transcend generational divides.”

Here are a selection of moments in Ramona’s life, as seen through the eyes of her illustrators.

Nora Krugis an editor and writer in Book World.

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