Walter Dean Myers is an African-American writer of young adult fiction and children’s books. His novels are about teens and the challenges they face. He is known to write tough stories about kids who don't appear in most storybooks," asserted Sue Corbett in a Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service report. "Children whose fathers are absent or jailed. About children who share playgrounds with drug dealers and gangs. About teens struggling to maintain their dignity and living with poverty, violence, and fear."
Walter Milton Myers was born August 12, 1937 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Myers lost his mother, Mary Green Myers, at age two, during the birth of his younger sister Imogene. Since his father, George Ambrose, was struggling economically, Walter and two of his sisters were informally adopted by family friends Florence and Herbert Dean. The Dean family moved him to Harlem. His foster mother, a half-Indian and half-German woman, taught Walter to read at the age of four, even though she was barely literate. She read to him every day from True Romance Magazine. He had a speech impediment when he was little, which made it hard for him to communicate with others, but he overcame it by expressing himself through writing short stories and poems. At the age of ten he began to write fiction. His favorite places in his childhood were the basketball courts and the library. The library was a favorite place because he couldn't believe that one of the things he enjoyed most, reading, was free.
The years Walter attended high school were hard for him, because of his speech impediment. But that didn't stop him from writing. In high school he was a good student and could read well but he was behavioral problem. He once said he arrived at school every day read to conquer the world, but no one could understand what he was saying. That was very frustrating for him and he responded by being very angry. Even though he was a good student in school, he knew his family couldn’t afford college for his so he dropped out of high school at age 15, went back at 16, and after again struggling with the social part he dropped out of school to join the army at 17. Before leaving school a teacher recognized his talent for writing and told him to keep writing no matter what.
After serving three years in the Army, he was discharged. He was in the Army from 1954-1957. After he was discharged from the Army, he had many odd jobs. He didn't like any of those jobs, and all of this time he kept writing. In 1969, he won a contest organized by the Council on Interracial Books for Children with his first published children’s book “Where does a day go?”; about a walk in the park led by an African American dad; he takes along several children from different ethnic backgrounds, and all the kids tell their ideas about the sun, moon, and passage of time. With his first book being published Walter Milton Myers became Walter Dean Myers as an honor to his foster parents, and started his career as a professional writer. In the 1970s Myers wrote several other picture books for young readers, including The Dragon Takes a Wife. He was hired at the Bobbs-Merrill publishing house, and spent seven years there learning the book business from the editorial side. He earned a college degree from Empire State College in 1984 and began teaching writing at a middle school. The first novel for teens that he wrote, “Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff”, was published in 1975. It came know by accident, because of a short story he had submitted to his agent, who sent it on to an editor. The editor assumed it was a chapter in a book, and asked how the rest of the project was going. As he recalled in the interview with Amanda Smith in Publishers Weekly, "I said, 'It goes like this,' and I made it up on the spot. She offered me a contract." His 1979 book “The Young Landlords”, about a group of teens who are given an apartment building to manage on their own, won him a Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association. The annual honor is given to the top book for young readers by an African American author. Myers would win the King award several more times for other books, including “Fallen Angels”, about a Harlem teen who enlists in the Army during the Vietnam War. The book was written in honor of his younger brother, Sonny, who like Myers' enlisted in the Army in 1968. Sonny was sent to Southeast Asia at the height of Vietnam War, and was killed in combat on his first day. Like most of Myers's works, it showed up on school and public library bookshelves. Later, he said the best letter he ever received from a reader was from a young man who had wanted to enlist in the military because of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. "He was so excited he couldn't wait until he turned 17 to join up," Myers recalled in the interview with Amanda Smith in Publishers Weekly . "He read my book and changed his mind”. Walter Dean Myers has accomplished a lot during his career. He has over eighty books to his name and over forty awards. The most awards he ever got for one book is four and that book is titled, “Somewhere in the Darkness”. He got the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, the Booklist Editors Choice, Newbery Honor Book Award, and ALA Best Books for Young Adults Award. He was recently awarded the first ever Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature for his book “Monster”.
In his personal life Myers has had two marriages. His first was in 1960, to Joyce and had two children, Karen and Michael Dean. That marriage unfortunately ended in divorce. His second marriage was to Constance Brendel, whom is his current wife. They were married June 19, 1973, and they have a child, named Christopher, who illustrates books for his dad. These days Walter Dean Myers lives with his family in Jersey City, New Jersey. He also makes appearances with the National Basketball Association's "Read to Achieve" program. He still writes every day, and has a daily routine. Every day, between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. he gets up, and then he puts on his 20 pound vest and walks about five miles a day. He gets home round 7:00, showers, and starts working on his writing. He sets a goal to get ten pages done a day.
Michael Dean Myers can be an inspiration to anyone that has a dream to become a professional writer. He rose above being a poor black orphaned male to become a successful writer. He took his own life experiences and what he observed around him and turned them into books that reach out to the youth in America; teaching us it’s ok to write about a society everyone doesn’t agree with as long as you believe in what you’re writing.