A short life of the author
Walter Dean Myers (1937–2014) was one of the most prolific, honored, and necessary writers in American young adult literature. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, he published more than a hundred books — novels, picture books, poetry, nonfiction — that gave Black boys, in particular, stories about their own lives: stories about Harlem, about basketball, about war, about prison, about the daily negotiations of growing up Black and poor in America. He did this work when almost no one else in mainstream children’s publishing was doing it.
Life and Career
Walter Milton Myers was born on 12 August 1937 in Martinsburg, West Virginia. After his mother died, he was raised by foster parents — Herbert and Florence Dean — in Harlem, and he added their surname to his own. He attended Stuyvesant High School, dropped out at seventeen, and joined the Army. After military service, he worked a series of jobs — mail clerk, factory worker, construction laborer — while writing at night.
His first book, Where Does the Day Go? (1969), was a picture book. Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975) was his first YA novel. Through the late 1970s and 1980s he established himself as a leading writer of YA fiction with Hoops (1981), Motown and Didi (1984), Fallen Angels (1988), and Scorpions (1988).
Fallen Angels (1988) — about a young Black soldier’s experience in Vietnam — won the Coretta Scott King Award and is widely assigned in schools. Scorpions (1988) — about a Harlem boy pressured to lead a gang — won a Newbery Honor. Both books exemplify Myers’s strengths: direct prose, authentic dialogue, and a refusal to sugarcoat the realities his characters face.
Monster (1999) was his most formally innovative work: a novel presented as a screenplay, written by a sixteen-year-old on trial for murder, interspersed with his journal entries. It won the first Michael L. Printz Award and was a National Book Award finalist. The novel’s formal structure — the screenplay as a way of distancing the protagonist from his own situation — adds a literary dimension to what could have been a conventional problem novel.
Myers was named the third National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2012. He died on 1 July 2014.
Key Works
- Fallen Angels (1988)
- Scorpions (1988)
- Monster (1999)
- Hoops (1981)
Collecting Myers
Monster first edition (HarperCollins, 1999) — Printz Award winner — brings $50–$200. Fallen Angels first edition (Scholastic, 1988) signed brings $75–$250. Myers signed at school visits and events throughout his career; signed copies of major titles are available but valued. His death in 2014 fixed the supply. Complete collections of his picture books with illustrators including Christopher Myers (his son) are separately collected.