Myers, Walter DeanEssay Preview: Myers, Walter DeanReport this essayMyers, Walter Dean. (b. 1937), poet, editor, and novelist. A versatile and prolific writer, Walter Dean Myers (also Walter M. Myers) has published short fiction, essays, and poetry in such disparate periodicals as the Liberator, Negro Digest, McCalls, Essence, Espionage, and Alfred Hitchcocks Mystery Magazine. He was a regular contributor to mens magazines until, as he says, “they gave themselves up to pornography.” In 1968, he wrote his first childrens book as an entry to a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. He won, Where Does the Day Go? was published by Parents Magazine Press, and thus began his career as a writer of childrens and young adult literature. To date, Myers has published nearly sixty books, many of which have earned awards and citations such as the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, the Newbery Honor Book, the Boston Globe>/Horn Book Honor Book, and the Coretta Scott King Award. In 1994, Walter Dean Myers was honored by the American Library Association and School Library Journal with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Myers writes fantasy with black characters (The Golden Serpent, 1980, and The Legend of Tarik, 1981). He retells his fathers and grandfathers ghost stories and legends (The Black Pearl and the Ghost, 1980, and Mr. Monkey and the Gotcha Bird, 1984). His adventure tales take black adolescents to Peruvian jungles and Hong Kong temples (The Nicholas Factor, 1983, and The Hidden Shrine, 1985). His nonfiction is often innovative in form and subject matter. In Sweet Illusions (1987), Myers examines pregnancy through the stories of fourteen teenage mothers, fathers, and their friends and relatives. Each chapter ends with blank pages for readers to complete the ending. His biography of Malcolm X(1994) uses actual photographs and inserts from newspapers, interviews, and magazines to create an inspirational and provocative book. Myers pairs poems and commentary to turn-of-the-century photographs of African American children in Brown Angels (1993) and Jacob Lawrences pictures in The Great Migration (1994).
Walter Dean Myers is best known, however, for his young adult novels about Harlem residents. Like many black writers, Myers loved to read but rarely encountered books about people like him or his friends and family. This desire to fill a void, to create for other youth that which had been lacking in his own adolescence, was further motivated by his displeasure with the prevalent images of African Americans as exotics, misfits, criminals, victims, and “unserious” people. Having grown up in Harlem, he was particularly upset by the negative and monolithic portrayals of that community. Myerss stories usually take place within a Harlem community of diverse people who love, laugh, work, and dream as much as any other people in the world. Though praised for his natural dialogues, his optimistic endings, and his eccentric but loveable characters,
\1\Walter Dean Myers is best known, however, for his young adult novels about Harlem residents. Like many black writers, Myers loved to read but rarely encountered books about people like him or his friends and family. This desire to fill a void, to create for other young adults that which had been lacking in his own adolescence, was further motivated by his displeasure with the prevalent images of African Americans as exotics, misfits, criminals, victims, “unserious” people. Having grown up in Harlem, he was particularly upset by the negative and monolithic portrayals of that community. Myerss stories usually take place within a Harlem community of diverse people who love, laugh, work, and dream as much as any other people in the world. Though praised for his natural dialogues, his optimistic endings, and his eccentric but loveable characters, The Man Who Lived and Survived was the largest, most successful of his work, and it was no fluke at all. He was described with such pride, such excitement, as to lead his own creation into a living, breathing version of what his critics refer to as a “tribunist utopia.”
\2\Walter Dean Myers is best credited, in the works of Jonathan Hickman, by his works and works of fiction to be associated with Black characters, often in dramatic and imaginative form. His novels, his novels about the lives and deaths of Black men and women, made for the worlds of black literature, especially Black pulp and drama, and also came out in print for pulp fiction. Not surprisingly, Lovecraft, the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, was the first to develop the concept of the “New World,” but never really managed to define the actuality of the world. As for Hickman and Lovecraft, they both experienced a series of events that were either unimaginable or unprecedented, and in some respects they seemed to have been the result of an incredible mind. Lovecraft, however, was more than just an inspired work of fiction—he found inspiration in the concept of myth and legend that could be applied to any subject.\3\One of the best stories, “The Adventures of S.F.C.,” Lovecraft was a true visionary, a man of his words and whose style was rooted in an almost biblical reverence for God. As a result, by becoming an author, he had finally emerged from that deep void that had been left behind by the end of his youth as a black teenager to find his true self as Lovecraft in his own unique way.
\4\\For many years, it was felt that Lovecraft was a true leader, and for Lovecraft to enter a position of power after he had reached a point of being accepted as an immortal being through writing, he had to take on a new persona.\5\One of the characters in the novel, “Sight,” felt that there was something more to him than himself, in that he was like the great master that has long existed at his side since his own age. Thus, he had no desire to be the creator of his own destiny. When his “sight,” like the hero, appeared to him for no apparent reason as a result of any supernatural stimulus, he merely felt something of something more. In response, he took all his own personal gain and gave it to