Walter Dean Myers

Walter Dean Myers, was a prolific American children’s author best known for his urban fiction inspired by his childhood and adolescence in the Harlem district of New York City. His body of work consists of more than a hundred books, including novels, picture books, and poetry.

Early life and education

Walter Milton Myers was born on August 12, 1937, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, a small town with a rich history dating back to the American Civil War. After his mother died when he was two years old, he left Martinsburg to live with his extended family members Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem. Myers would later incorporate their name into his own in their honor.

When he was a boy, Myers had a passion for reading and storytelling. He also had, as he explained in a 2005 interview, “a speech defect [that meant] kids could not understand me, teachers couldn’t understand me, when I spoke.” His experience, which was something his brother also faced and which Myers attributed to his tendency to speak rapidly, left him very frustrated. Myers was also, as he later recalled, “constantly busy in school”—which meant fighting, setting fires, giving answers in class without being called on, and rushing ahead in books. An encouraging and sympathetic sixth-grade teacher—who, Myers noted, was also an ex-marine—helped him to manage the situation, not least by forcing him to undergo speech therapy.

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Myers continued to nurture his writing into high school, though he dropped out when he discovered that his foster parents could not send him to university because of financial hardships. He subsequently joined the U.S. Army at age 17. Three years later he returned to New York City, where he held multiple jobs, including those of messenger and construction worker, while also attending writing classes at the City College of New York and Columbia University. In 1984 he graduated from the State University of New York, Empire State College (now Empire State University), at its Manhattan location.

Writing career

While working in New York City, Myers began contributing articles and stories to magazines and other publications. In 1969 his writing career began to flourish when his first picture book, Where Does the Day Go?, won a writing contest organized by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. The next year, Myers began working as an acquisitions editor for the Bobbs-Merrill Company, where he sought to support Black authors and readers. He left the publishing house in 1977 to commit to writing full-time.

Myers’s works often centre on the experiences of economically disadvantaged Black children and young adults in American cities, with particular emphasis on New York City and, specifically, the neighbourhood of Harlem. Myers made sure to include diverse urban experiences, a choice inspired in part by his own childhood and his encounters with the civil rights movement and the Black Arts movement. Books that exemplify this approach include Scorpions (1988), which describes the entanglement between a boy and the violence of gang life, and Monster (1999), one of Myers’s best-known works, which follows Steve Harmon, a 16-year-old boy on trial for allegedly being an accomplice to the murder of a Harlem drugstore owner. Similarly, Lockdown (2010) tells the story of 14-year-old Reese, who is in a juvenile jail for stealing doctors’ prescription pads and selling them to drug dealers.

Some of Myers’s most significant novels are set outside the United States and concentrate on global conflict, as seen in Fallen Angels (1988), in which high-school graduate Ritchie Perry goes overseas to serve in the Vietnam War; Sunrise over Fallujah (2008), which describes the experiences of a young U.S. soldier serving in the Civil Affairs Battalion during the Iraq War; and Invasion (2013), which centres on the Normandy Invasion during the late stages of World War II. The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride Met Courage (2006) is a nonfiction account of an African American infantry regiment that fought in World War I.

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In other books, Myers explored other pathways of opportunity for children in America’s cities—namely, through sports. His Hoops (1981) lays bare the problems of game fixing and gambling on sports, the realities of player-coach dynamics, and the transformative power of basketball, while Slam! (1996) features 17-year-old Gregory Harris, a basketball player who goes by the name Slam and is a mixture of prodigious talent, fiery temper, and antipathy for schoolwork.

In addition, Myers wrote picture books for younger children, including The Dragon Takes a Wife (1972), How Mr. Monkey Saw the Whole World (1996), and The Blues of Flats Brown (2000). Several of his books, including Monster, Harlem (1997), which is a Caldecott Honor Book, and Looking Like Me (2009), were illustrated by his son Christopher Myers.

Among his young adult nonfiction works, Myers’s published biographies include Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (1993); At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England (1999), about Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Omoba Aina); and The Greatest: Muhammad Ali (2001). In 2001 Myers published Bad Boy: A Memoir, his reflections on his youth in Harlem.

Later life, awards and legacy

In 2000 Myers became the first recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, bestowed by the American Library Association for literary excellence in young adult literature. A decade later he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Amherst College, and he also became the inaugural recipient of the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, presented to a Black author whose body of work has made lasting contributions to children’s and young adult literature. In addition, he was a National Book Award finalist three times. From 2012 to 2013 Myers served as the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Myers died of an illness on July 1, 2014, in New York City. He was 76 years old. He was survived by his wife, Constance, and his two sons, Christopher and Michael Dean. He was predeceased by his daughter, Karen. Myers’s novels On a Clear Day (2014), which chronicles the struggles between teenagers and the global elite in 2035, and Juba! (2015), an account of the 19th-century dancer William Henry Lane, were published posthumously.

The first Walter Award, named in Myers’s honour, was presented in 2016; the prize program, which has expanded since its founding, celebrates diversity in books for children and teens. In 2019 Myers was posthumously awarded the Children’s Literature Legacy Award for his contributions to children’s literature.