

Keith discovers his missing motorcycle in the wastebasket. Startled by a telephone ring, both Ralph and the motorcycle fall into a metal wastebasket. While Keith is away, Ralph attempts to ride it, but cannot figure out how to start it. Keith leaves a toy motorcycle on his bedside table. One day a boy named Keith Gridley and his family visit the hotel on their way through California. Ralph longs for a life of danger and speed, wishing to get away from his relatives, who worry about the mice colony being discovered. Ralph is a mouse who lives in the run-down Mountain View Inn, a battered resort hotel in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Mouse character in the following decades, and a film adaptation of The Mouse and The Motorcycle was produced in 1986. Cleary went on to write two more books featuring the Ralph S. The book was released as a selection of the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club (Intermediate Division) and won the William Allen White Children's Book Award in 1968. The story and characters were inspired both by Cleary's son, who while recovering from a fever played with miniature cars and motorcycles, and by a neighbor who had shown Cleary a small mouse that had been trapped in a bucket. Mouse, a house mouse who can speak to humans (though typically only children), goes on adventures riding his miniature motorcycle, and who longs for excitement and independence while living with his family in a run-down hotel.

It is the first in a trilogy featuring Ralph S. The Mouse and the Motorcycle is a children's novel written by Beverly Cleary, illustrated by Louis Darling and published in 1965.
