Walter Dean Myers
Walter Dean Myers is an author.
Harlem is where nearly all of Walter Dean Myers's fiction lives. He was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia and grew up in Harlem afterwards. A difficult childhood pushed him toward writing, and teachers were the ones who told him it counted as a way to speak. He published more than a hundred books across young adult novels, picture books, poetry and nonfiction.
His subject is a boy under pressure who has to decide something, usually with no adult in the room worth asking. The books circle a basketball season that doubles as a job interview, a funeral, an enlistment, a block that will not let go. The prose is plain to the point of severity, which is exactly what lets the dialogue carry the feeling, and he never used a setting as scenery. Fallen Angels, about American infantry in Vietnam, is one of the most frequently challenged books in the United States, both for its language and for refusing to make the war legible or heroic.
He won the Coretta Scott King Award five times. His books sat on classroom syllabuses and banned lists at the same time, which is a fair summary of where he stood.
Books (7)
Where to start with Walter Dean Myers
Fallen angels is the one to read first and the one people mean when they name him. It follows a Harlem teenager into Vietnam, and the achievement is tonal: no speeches, no arc of maturity, just a boy noticing that nothing here is being explained to him. It is also the book most likely to be pulled off a school shelf, which tells you it works.
Among the contemporary novels, Autobiography of my dead brother is the heaviest and the best made, told partly in drawings, and Game is the most approachable, a basketball novel that is really about a scholarship and about who gets seen. Darius & Twig is quieter, and closest to writing about writing.
For his nonfiction, At her majesty's request is a genuine oddity, a true Victorian story a long way from Harlem. Beast is for readers already in.