Welcome

  • Monster Graphic Novel
    Monster Graphic Novel
    A stunning black-and-white graphic novel adaptation of Walter Dean Myers's Michael L. Printz Award winner and New York Times bestseller Monster, adapted by Guy Sims and illustrated by Dawud Anyabwile.
  • Juba! A Novel
    Juba! A Novel
    New York Times bestselling author Walter Dean Myers's last novel, delivers a gripping story based on the life of a real dancer known as Master Juba, who lived in the nineteenth century, and influenced today's tap, jazz, and step dancing.
  • On A Clear Day
    On A Clear Day
    Young heroes decide that they are not too young or too powerless to change their world in this gripping, futuristic young adult novel.
  • Darius & Twig
    Darius & Twig
    Darius & Twig, a novel about friendship and needing to live one's own dream is a 2014 Coretta Scott King Honor Book.
  • Bad Boy
    Bad Boy
    As a boy, Walter Dean Myers was quick-tempered and always ready for a fight. He also read voraciously. He would check out books from the library and carry them home, hidden in brown paper bags in order to avoid other boys' teasing. Bad Boy is his story.

 

In the beginning, there was a boy. A distracted, disruptive boy — a bad boy, his teachers said. A tall, athletic boy who fought with other kids and threw books around the classroom and talked when he wasn’t supposed to. A boy who stumbled over his words but moved with perfect grace on the basketball court. A boy who read voraciously — Mark Twain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce — even after he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School in New York. A boy whose questing intelligence was engaged in a long and complicated conversation with the books he read, books that made him feel more real than his real life did but that were also silent about black boys like him.

Walter Dean Myers, New York City, Constance Myers
Myers in New York City, 1982.
Photograph by Constance Myers

“In truth, everything in my life in 1951 that was personal and had value was white,” Walter Dean Myers later wrote in his memoir “Bad Boy.” It wasn’t until he reached adulthood and read “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin, a fellow Harlemite, that he felt he had permission to offer the world a narrative with blackness at its core. By then, after a stint in the Army, he was writing seriously. In 1968, his picture-book manuscript for “Where Does the Day Go” won a contest for black writers by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. It was published the following year. Eventually he would write more than a hundred books for young people: lyrical picture books and gritty novels, poetry and short stories, history, biography, memoir, books that earned him nearly every major award children’s publishing had to offer.

Literature was his one true faith, the lens through which he surveyed every aspect of the human condition. His personal mission: To create literature about the people whose stories had been left off the shelf.
“If we continue to make black children nonpersons by excluding them from books and by degrading the black experience, and if we continue to neglect white children by not exposing them to any aspect of other racial and ethnic experiences in a meaningful way, we will have a next racial crisis,” he predicted in the pages of The Times in 1986.

He would write about the lack of diversity in children’s literature in The Times again, in March of this year. He was responding to the depressing news that while about half of American children are a race other than white, less than 10 percent of the children’s books published in 2013 were about minorities. He ended his essay with the words, “There is work to be done.”

Work was something he always welcomed, though. Fiercely disciplined, he wrote a minimum of five pages a day until shortly before his death. (Once, when a child asked him what the hardest part about writing was, he said: “There are no hard parts. It’s all work, and you have to put your mind and heart in it. It’s work. It’s all good.”) There was no greater calling, he felt, than to do for others what “Sonny’s Blues” had done for him.

Books had given him both an identity and a way to affect the world, his son, Christopher Myers, told me recently. “He felt that he owed books a repayment,” he said. “All his books were about rendering the invisible visible.”

By Dashka Slater. Reprinted from the New York Times/The Lives They Lived

43 thoughts on “Welcome”

  1. I just easily finished reading Fallen Angels. Of the many, many books I have read about war (both fiction and non-fiction), and especially about the VietNam war, this has to be at the top of the list. The flow of the story is fantastic, which made the book so easy to read. Thank you so much for this reading experience. I love your style. Will now pursue reading other books of yours.

  3. I don’t have any information about this article but I just wanted to say that Walter Dean myers is an outstanding author. He’s wonderful and he keeps his readers hooked to his novels!!Keep doing what you do best!!!!!!

  7. I loves this book about mr.walter dean Myers it is Called “love that dog” it is a poetry book and it is a really great book I really recommend reading that book

    2. Me to! I have to do a report on him and I can’t find any thing online about his poem “to a child of war

  13. I have been reading the glory field, and it is truly a greatly written novel. I have been meaning to go out and get monter. Great books

  17. Walter dean Myers is amazing he really inspired me big time i want to be an author because of him rest in peace Walter dean Myers rest in peace

  22. Walter Dean Myers will always be loved by every single person that read his book. He gave (and still conitues to give ) people hope for a change. R.I.P. Walker Dean Myers.

  24. I do not really enjoy reading, but your books are great! They keep me interested and I learn some good things about myself sometimes. I will continue to read your books until I have finished them all. I am now doing an author study for my language arts class on you and some of your books. Slam and Hoops are my two favorites because I love to play basketball.

  27. I JUST LOVE WALTER HE WAS A BOY THAT HAS ALWAYS CHASED HIS DREAMS AND AS BECAME A MAN HE DID THE SAME BUT I LOVE HIS BOOK BAD BOY.<3 🙂

  28. i think that walter dean myers is a very smart person and i give a lot of respect for what he did. i like to thank him for writing all of those books for all ages. i like to thank him for going into the army for ww2.and now i know alot about walter dean myers!!

  29. Began reading Monster yesterday morning and couldn’t stop, finished it by the evening. Was completely mesmerized by Mr. Myers storytelling ability and sense of humanity. Ordered three more, interested in reading up on the man’s memoirs and learning more about the person behind the superior works! Thank you for the inspiration, and RIP.

      1. This book is so cool I loveeeeww it its so awsome I wish he was still alive I like how it talks about devil worship

  32. Wow. This is really nice. I am currently reading one of his books for the first time,Somewhere In the Darkness. What caught my eye was his last name, Myers, well my last name is Myers too. So I decided to look him up, just being curious, well I find this information verry intressting, not only did I want to find out about this man I was also searching for some advice too, I was looking for some insparation to make a book like Ive always wanted but when I try…I just lose all focas and I wonder off from it and when I go to return to it after a few days I dont find it too intressting, so I scrap it. But this does help alot. Thank you.

  33. i know im late but you were a huge inspiration on my book i didnt release yet called “we gon make it”…i was inspired by monster and slam…thanks #Bonez #RIP

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