Dear Mr. Henshaw
by Beverly Cleary
Summary
Sixth grader Leigh Botts starts writing to Boyd Henshaw, his favorite author, as a school assignment, irritated at first by the author's playful refusal to just answer Leigh's questions for him. Henshaw pushes back instead, challenging Leigh to keep a diary of his own, and that diary becomes the real engine of the book: entries where Leigh works through his parents' divorce, the loneliness of starting over at a new school, his father's unreliability as a long haul trucker who keeps promising visits he doesn't make, and a thief who keeps stealing the good parts out of his lunch. Cleary lets Leigh's letters and diary entries do all the narrating, so the reader watches him get steadily more honest with himself on the page even as he stays guarded with the adults around him.
Leigh enters a Young Writers contest with an essay about hauling grapes with his father one summer and wins only an honorable mention, a disappointment softened when the actual winner is disqualified for copying someone else's story and Leigh is invited to a lunch with a published author instead, not Henshaw himself but a different writer who praises his work anyway. The ending is modest by design: Leigh's father does not magically become reliable, and the lunch thief is never caught at all, but Leigh closes the book having found something durable in his own writing voice.
Cleary, already loved for the much lighter Ramona and Henry Huggins books, writes Leigh's loneliness and small triumphs with real restraint and a fair amount of quiet humor rather than melodrama, and the letter and diary format keeps the pace brisk even though little of what happens is conventionally exciting. It suits a reader old enough to sit with a story about disappointment that never fully resolves.
Historical Context & Significance
Dear Mr. Henshaw won the 1984 Newbery Medal. That year's honor books were Bill Brittain's The Wish Giver, Kathryn Lasky's Sugaring Time, Elizabeth George Speare's The Sign of the Beaver, and Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, the second Tillerman Cycle novel to be recognized by the committee in as many years. William Morrow published the novel in August 1983; it runs a spare 144 pages, illustrated, like its 1991 sequel Strider, by Paul O. Zelinsky.
Kirkus Reviews, weighing it against Cleary's more comic work, wrote that it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that make the Ramona books so rewarding, a real reservation about the book's more serious turn. Critic Zena Sutherland took the opposite view, calling it a gem in 1983 and praising how deftly Cleary shows her protagonist changing. A 2007 National Education Association poll of teachers named it one of the top one hundred books for children, and Strider carries Leigh forward into high school eight years later.