1984: DEAR MR. HENSHAW by Beverly Cleary with illustrations by Paul O. Zelinsky
Dear Mr. Henshaw, My teacher read your book about the dog to our class. It was funny. We licked it. Your freind, Leigh Botts (boy)
It is unbelievably hack to open an essay, even ironically, with "Webster's Dictionary defines…" but I'm overjoyed that I get to do it today in the only acceptable context.
Webster's Dictionary defines "stan" as "an extremely or excessively enthusiastic and devoted fan" [noun] or to "exhibit fandom to an extreme or excessive degree : [be] an extremely devoted and enthusiastic fan of someone or something" [verb]. The definition of "stan" is less important than the etymology; "stan" has been added to several official dictionaries in the past few years - Merriam-Webster added it in 2019 and the OED added it two years earlier - and all entries trace their origin back to the same place. That's right.
"Stan", the word, is from "Stan", the song, as in the 2000 single by Eminem with a hook by Dido (hey remember Dido?). It was a massive single off of a massive Grammy-winning diamond-certified album, it was on top of the charts in multiple countries, and was one of Eminem's moments of peak cultural ubiquity - he has had several throughout his career - as it kicked off a decade where he would become the single best-selling artist in any genre, a feat that was especially impressive as he spent half of that decade recovering from addiction and not putting any music out at all. "Stan" is one of the most acclaimed tracks by one of the best-selling and most awarded rappers of all time - it's probably Eminem's second-most beloved track after "Lose Yourself" - so yeah of course it inspired its own slang term that people still use today when they say "I stan this" to mean "I love this particular piece of culture so much I will murder innocent people, including children, over it".
See, "Stan" is the story of a fictional Eminem fan who writes multiple letters to Eminem but receives no response ("Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still ain't callin'..."). Stan's level of attachment to Eminem is obviously unsettling, his mental state deteriorates sharply after repeatedly getting blanked by his favorite rapper, and he eventually loses his mind, murders his pregnant girlfriend, and kills himself by driving off a bridge. And while that doesn't exactly look like the song of the summer on paper, this song was absolutely everywhere in 2000. I was in middle school, I wasn't allowed to listen to Eminem, I didn't really pay a lot of attention to popular music at all at the time, and even I knew the basic gist of "Stan".
I knew, for instance, one of the most distinctive things about "Stan": it's epistolary. That is, the four verses are narrated through letters, three from Stan and one from Eminem. There weren't a lot of epistolary songs, especially epistolary rap songs, out in the world in 2000, and certainly none that were as popular as "Stan". If you were a middle schooler when "Stan" came out, this was possibly the first time you got to hear someone tell a story through letters, revealing characters entirely through what and how they write, and you'd see it later in life as you read works like Frankenstein or Dracula or Pride And Prejudice or Dangerous Liaisons or Flowers For Algernon or Carrie. It also helps that "Stan" was a really good song, that it was from a period of Eminem's career when he was at the top of his lyric-writing and rapping abilities, that he was partnered with Dr. Dre who knew how to tailor the album's production to Eminem's specific skill set, and that he was novel enough as a successful white rapper, and good enough at attracting attention and controversy, to be in the spotlight all of the time.
This is all to say that for an entire generation of young people, "Stan" was their first introduction to epistolary narratives, unless they had read Dear Mr. Henshaw first.
Beverly Cleary lived to be 104 years old and sold 91 million books; in publishing, this is called "doing Eminem numbers". Cleary, who once described her career as “exceptionally happy”, is the most beloved children's author in the history of the state of Oregon, easily blowing past Chuck Palahniuk. Public schools and libraries in Portland are named after her. The Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden in Portland includes statues of some of Cleary's most famous characters, Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins1. National Drop Everything And Read Day is on April 12th because that date is Beverly Cleary’s birthday.
Leigh Botts (who, as he will quickly tell you, is a boy, despite the spelling of his name) is not Cleary's most famous character, and as he would readily admit, he's not her most interesting character; he describes himself as "just a plain boy. This school doesn’t say I am Gifted and Talented, and I don’t like soccer very much the way everybody at this school is supposed to. I am not stupid either." That plain boy is the protagonist of Cleary's one Newbery medalist, Dear Mr. Henshaw2. Leigh is a “stan” (if you will) for Boyd Henshaw, the author of a book he really enjoys reading in second grade, and writes to Henshaw about once a year from his home in Bakersfield to let him know that he still really enjoys Henshaw’s books. Occasionally, he gets a short reply from Henshaw, although we never see those; the novel is told entirely through Leigh’s letters and journal entries. In sixth grade, Leigh mails a list of biographical questions to Henshaw as part of a language arts assignment, which is a mistake, because Henshaw is kind of a jackass who teases Leigh with his answers - he claims that he "write[s] books because [he has] read every book in the library and because writing beats mowing the lawn or shoveling snow" and that his favorite animal is "a purple monster who ate children who sent authors long lists of questions for reports instead of learning to use the library" - and sends Leigh a lengthy list of questions himself, to which Leigh’s mom makes him sit down and write out every answer.
There’s a lot on Leigh’s mind, as we see from his answers, nothing more so than his parents’ divorce. Leigh’s dad is a long-haul trucker who is never around and barely remembers to call, and his mom is busting her ass at a catering company to try and make ends meet and hold on to their tiny one-bedroom house. Leigh still hasn't made any friends at his school, and somebody keeps stealing food out of his lunchbox. It's the dreary everyday grind of a working-class kid in central California's I-5 corridor, which happens to be the dreariest and most grinding place that a person could live; Leigh describes it that way:
"Have you ever seen Interstate 5? It is straight and boring with nothing much but cotton fields and a big feedlot that you can smell a long way before you come to it. It is so boring that the cattle on the feedlot don’t even bother to moo. They just stand there. They don’t tell you that part in school when they talk about California’s Great Central Valley."
Leigh does not have much going for him at the start of the novel. At Henshaw's suggestion - and it's possible Henshaw suggested it because he was sick of getting letters from a kid - he starts writing in a journal, originally addressed to "Dear Mr. Pretend Henshaw", to keep working through his thoughts. And having a place to write every day, as it turns out, can be a pretty good thing to have going for you.
Like many famous children's authors, including several Newbery winners, Beverly Cleary started her career as a children's librarian. She worked in Yakima, Washington, and kept getting stumped when children would ask her for books about kids like them; there just weren’t a lot of books for young readers at that time about contemporary kids living in cities. As she once said in a 2011 interview with the Los Angeles Times: “I wanted to write about ordinary American children. The books I grew up with and found in the library … so many children lived in England and had nannies and pony carts, and I just wanted grubby neighborhood kids.” That same profile outlines Cleary’s influence on decades of writers to follow:
“...her books continue to resonate. Partly, it’s the example she has set, the authors she has influenced, those who write…“slice-of-life books.” Without Cleary, there’d probably be no Judy Blume; no Barbara Park, whose Junie B. Jones seems a direct descendant of Ramona; no Megan McDonald, author of the “Judy Moody” series; nor even, Patron suggests, Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” What all these authors do is bring a low-key realism to the territory of childhood, highlighting the dramas, large and small, of daily life. “I remember a sentence from an English class in college,” Cleary says, “that the proper subject of the novel is universal human experience. And that’s stayed with me all those years.”
What we have in Dear Mr. Henshaw is another instance of “low-key realism”; the main conflicts are Leigh being kind of sad about his dad and trying to catch the lunchbox thief. It would be easy for an author to make this boring or, because it’s a book about divorce, miserable “bummer lit”. But we’re talking about Beverly Cleary here, who never makes the main character miserable just to score an easy emotional point, and who always packs her stories with memorable and resonant details. I still remember the details of Leigh’s homemade lunchbox alarm3, just like you might remember the Dawnzer or the Chevrolet doll from the Ramona books. Like every Cleary novel, it’s very low-stakes, but like every Cleary novel, it’s also a quiet triumph that can somehow connect to everyone’s childhood. You pick this book up, or any other book by Cleary, and there will be something in there that trips a wire in your memory.
The central arc of Dear Mr. Henshaw isn’t Leigh being miserable, or even Leigh catching the lunchbox thief (which he actually never does); it’s the more universal human experience of Leigh learning to express himself and process his feelings, in his case through writing. And, just as we see Stan’s mental state deteriorate with each letter he writes to Eminem, we see Leigh’s writing grow more confident and better able to articulate the complex mess of emotions that every middle schooler has to navigate. Obviously, Leigh’s writing improves in a technical sense as he grows up - his early letters to Henshaw are very short and full of misspelled words - but the way he talks about himself noticeably improves. He goes from being “just a plain boy” or “just a boy nobody pays much attention to” to someone who can see his dad, assess him more honestly, and “feel sad and a whole lot better at the same time”, or someone who can revisit old books by his favorite author and say “I read harder books now, but I still feel good when I read that book.”
The other piece of this story arc is Leigh writing a short story and submitting it in a contest. After some failed attempts to write a horror story, he instead writes out a true account of a day when he rode along in his dad’s truck. The story gets an honorable mention in the contest, and Leigh is invited to a group lunch with a famous Beverly-Cleary-type author as his prize. That author compliments Leigh’s story by telling him “you wrote like you, and you did not try to imitate someone else. This is one mark of a good writer. Keep it up.” Nobody else was writing like Cleary did when she started out; she wrote like herself, and she did not try to imitate anyone else. In the years since, quite a few people tried to imitate her, and I read harder books now, but I still feel good when I go back and read some Beverly Cleary.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1994 medalist, The Giver by Lois Lowry.
Sadly, the garden does not have a statue of Cleary's most underrated character, Otis Spofford.
Ramona And Her Father and Ramona Quimby, Age Eight were also finalists.
I personally consider this detail ‘resonant’ because I went to a Catholic grade school, and the public school kids would use our classrooms on Tuesday nights for CCD, so me and my classmates were often thinking through ways to booby-trip our desks in case the filthy publics tried to go through our stuff.