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The Atlantic's Beverly Cleary Benjamin Schwarz has a nice piece about Beverly Clearly in this month's magazine:

Cleary lived and remembered her own childhood with a preternatural intensity, as attested by her memoirs, A Girl From Yamhill and My Own Two Feet—books of extraordinary elegance and candor that deserve far greater acclaim than the blandly warm accolades they’ve received. Her magic partly consists of her ability to transfer episodes from her own childhood with photographic and psychological exactitude. She had her characters simply inhabit the Portland, Oregon, neighborhood around Klickitat Street (a name she had always liked because it reminded her of “the sound of knitting needles”), where she spent part of her childhood—her friend’s house, for instance, became Henry Huggins’s house.

It's an interesting, reasonably in-depth article about one of Oregon's most beloved authors—and it really makes me want to read her memoirs. (Has anyone?) Read the whole piece here.