Writer Walter Dean Myers died on Wednesday after a brief illness at age 76, leaving mourners in the adult world and young readers who saw themselves in his books. He expanded the face of publishing so that many children of color saw themselves reflected in his work.
Myers wrote more than 100 books, most of them in the genre of fiction for Young Adults (YA). Most of those dealt with the challenges of urban life for young black men, and the complicated moral minefield they have to negotiate to stay in one piece.
"A turning point for me was the discovery of a short story by James Baldwin about the black urban experience," Myers wrote. "It gave me permission to write about my own experiences. Somehow I always go back to the most turbulent periods of my own life. I write books for the troubled boy I once was."
Walter Milton Myers was born on Aug. 12, 1937, in Martinsburg, W. Va., but he didn't stay there long. His mother died in childbirth when he was a toddler, and his father George sent Walter and his brother Mickey to stay with a Harlem couple he knew, Florence and Herbert Dean. (Florence was George Myers' first wife. In tribute to the parents who raised him, Myers added Dean to his name.) The Deans raised the boys in a loving, protected environment, although young Walter often got tantalizing glimpses of the Harlem street life he wasn't allowed to investigate up close. He was already a rabid reader when he started school at Public School 125. He was one of those kids who was intelligent, but not academically inclined. And he got teased a lot for having a speech impediment.
Tall, thin and with that speech impediment, Myers was smart, angry and, as he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, "always in trouble." (He didn't tolerate being teased for his stutter.) He hovered around the fringes of Harlem's young criminal life but it was reading that saved him.
"Reading pushed me to discover worlds beyond my landscape," he wrote on his website, "especially during dark times when my uncle was murdered and my family became dysfunctional with alcohol and grief."