Ellen Grae by Bill Cleaver

First published: 1967

Subjects: Coming-of-age, family, friendship, and social issues

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Thicket, a small town in rural Florida

Principal Characters:

• Ellen Grae Derryberry, an eleven-year-old who is sent to live with a surrogate family during the school year by her divorced parents
• Grover, her best friend in Thicket, who is a few years older than Ellen Grae
• Ira, a middle-aged, mentally retarded man
• Mrs. McGruder, the well-meaning, kindly woman who cares for Ellen Grae during the school year
• Rosemary, Ellen Grae’s stylish and “stuck up” roommate in Florida

Form and Content

Ellen Grae, the first book by Bill and Vera Cleaver, is distinguished by its characterization, plot, and style, aspects of writing that would become their hallmarks. The novel is told crisply, with short sentences and paragraphs, in solid but not patronizing prose, and from a first-person point of view. Almost novella-length and reading like a superbly crafted short story, the book itself is surprisingly brief considering the density of its material and its meaning.

The reader is introduced to Ellen Grae, who every year is sent to spend the school term with Mr. and Mrs. McGruder by her divorced (although loving) parents. The opening words reveal in a clipped, character-revealing dialogue an eleven-year-old who admits to being troublesome and independent in her thinking. The first-person narration is of great importance—although it has been a source of criticism in that Ellen Grae sees herself as well as others through a fairly sophisticated lens—because the lessons that are learned in the book are Ellen Grae’s alone; she ends up sharing her values with no one else, save perhaps her fishing buddy, Grover. An omniscient point of view would not have allowed the reader to grow with the protagonist and come to some understanding of the moral dilemma in which she finds herself enmeshed.

The town “half wit,” Ira, who speaks only to Ellen Grae and her friend, Grover, confides in her that he has, mistakenly and without premeditation, killed his parents (who had cruelly set out to kill him) and that he has buried them in a swamp. Ellen Grae’s personality traits, which are derived from her amicably divorced parents, are independence and a creative imagination, which sometimes predisposes her to preposterous, although humorous, exaggerations and stories. She is, however, quite capable of sorting truth from fantasy, and this is what causes the conflict. If she tells the truth about Ira, she believes that he may be sent to the “crazy house” or jail, and while she has no trouble ascribing guilt to Ira’s parents (and not to him), she worries that they are not buried deep enough and that they have not had a proper burial.

Dealing silently with her moral quandary, Ellen Grae languishes. Soon her parents are sent for, and they succeed in prying the truth from her and forcing her to tell the story to the town sheriff, who accuses her of more excessive storytelling. In the end, when confronted with whether she had, indeed, fabricated this whole story, Ellen Grae finds it is easier to “admit” she had, thus angering and embarrassing her parents and making herself feel unsure and empty.

The ending of the novel is unresolved and ambiguous; Ellen Grae resumes her fishing trips with Grover, and her relationships with those who share her environment—her roommate, Rosemary, and Mrs. McGruder—are reinstated. Life will go on as before, as it always has in the quiet town of Thicket.

Critical Context

Ellen Grae, Bill and Vera Cleaver’s first novel, was published in 1967, at a time when children’s book fare was light, romantic, and episodic; mainly showcased intact families with young siblings; and often featured characters who romped around happily in the suburbs.

Ellen Grae signaled one of the earliest attempts to produce successfully a feisty, honest, thinking female character. (One thinks only of Louise Fitzhugh’s title character in 1964’s Harriet, the Spy as eclipsing her.) The Cleavers’ book presented social values and norms not then seen in children’s books; it was, for example, one of the first to present a protagonist of divorced parents, whose relationship is unstereotypically amicable and whom Ellen Grae calls by their first names. The themes of the book blatantly challenged and questioned prevailing norms and values by presenting a character who, at age eleven, was capable of coming to a state of self-awareness without the aid of adults.

From 1967 until 1981, when Bill Cleaver died, the couple produced seventeen books. The last, Hazel Rye, was finished by Vera Cleaver and published in 1983; she went on to write several novels until her death in 1992. Many of their books, two of which reintroduced Ellen Grae, include similarly strong female characters, notably The Whys and Wherefores of Littabelle Lee (1973) and the justly famous Where the Lilies Bloom (1969). The Cleavers never flinched from portraying social issues, often dealing with the difficult themes of mental retardation, death, alienation, poverty, and illness of the body and soul.

The Cleavers’ books also set a high standard in excellent, well-researched regional writing for children, setting stories not only in the rural Deep South, but in the southern Appalachians and the Ozarks, as well as in metropolitan areas such as Chicago and Seattle.

The Cleavers were trailblazers of the realistic and seriocomic novel for young children, and it is a tribute to them that their works, beginning with Ellen Grae, still display dignity, grace, and honesty as they guide the reader eloquently toward personal growth.