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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Walter Dean Myers

by Sherry Morton-Mollo

Other literary forms

One of the most prolific writers of fiction for young adults in the United States, Walter Dean Myers has also made numerous forays into other genres, including children’s picture books, historical biographies intended for students at both elementary and high school levels, short stories, and poetry that celebrates not only his childhood Harlem community (as in Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices, 2004) but also such diverse topics as the heroism of African American patriots and the unique rhythms of black music (as in Blues Journey, 2003, and Jazz, 2006). Myers has collaborated with his son Christopher (as illustrator) on many of these projects, including works that defy classification, such as the uniquely formatted Street Love (2006), which tells its story of young love across class lines in short lines of free verse, and the first-person perspectives of biblical personages in A Time to Love: Stories from the Old Testament (2003). Myers has also written a series of historical informational texts on prominent African American figures and topics. Additionally, he has produced a highly acclaimed memoir of his life titled Bad Boy (2001). Certainly a multifaceted talent, Myers has produced more than seventy works that appeal to readers of all age groups and sensibilities.

Walter Dean Myers.

ph_0111226278-Myers.jpg

(Courtesy, HarperCollins)

Achievements

Walter Dean Myers has repeatedly been cited as a sole “voice in the wilderness” for the African American youth and teenager. Myers has provided a voice for many who did not previously have one—becoming a writer for so many who have needed to see themselves represented in a literature bereft of that representation. For his unique contribution to literature, Myers has received many honors: He is a two-time Newbery Honor Book winner, for Scorpions and Somewhere in the Darkness, and has been cited five times as a Coretta Scott King Award winner, for his novels The Young Landlords, Motown and Didi, Fallen Angels, and Slam! and for the nonfiction work Now Is Your Time! The African-American Struggle for Freedom (1991). In 1994, Myers was presented with the American Library Award for “lifetime contribution to Young Adult Literature” for four of his novels. He has also been recognized twice as a National Book Award finalist, for Monster and Autobiography of My Dead Brother. Monster was also selected as the first recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature in 1999. Truly a pioneer in the genre, Myers continues to create relevant and powerful stories that explore the experiences of young African Americans.

Biography

Walter Dean Myers was born Walter Milton Myers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1937. His life was irrevocably altered when he lost his mother at a young age. His foster family (the Deans, whose name he adopted) moved to Harlem in New York City before his third birthday. Myers reportedly had a happy childhood, but he encountered problems in school because of a slight speech defect that hampered his pronunciation. His teachers, however, promoted and nurtured in him a love for reading and writing that fulfilled the young author-to-be.

Because the concept of actually supporting himself through writing did not occur to Myers until later, he left Stuyvesant High School at age seventeen to join the U.S. Army, in which he served from 1954 to 1957. This was an auspicious decision, as his military experience would provide the background that Myers would later use in several books, most notably Fallen Angels. After he was discharged from the Army, Myers obtained a bachelor of arts degree from Empire State College. He worked at several jobs, but the one that provided fortuitous insight for his future career was with the publishing company Bobbs-Merrill. Myers has stated that it was this experience that taught him the inner workings of the “book business” and informed him of the reality of writing—a reality that finally seemed possible to him.

The major impetus for Myers’s success in writing books was his winning of a contest for his children’s picture book Where Does the Day Go? (1969). Encouraged, Myers went on to publish several more children’s books before he moved on to full-length novels geared for young adults. In 1975, his first novel, Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff, appeared—after which it seems Myers began a full-time writing career and never looked back. What has followed is a cornucopia of works and artistic productions that give testament to a major literary talent who has not only filled a gap for young adult readers but also created a universe of inspiration for his audience. Myers frequently collaborates with his youngest son, Christopher, who is an artist and illustrator.

Analysis

Walter Dean Myers has been described as having a genius for creating realistic, gritty settings that serve as backdrops for his frequently dark dramas involving inner-city youth attempting to escape the destructive effects of the ghetto, urban life, and poverty that have plagued young African Americans. Myers’s novels tend to focus on young male characters (although female characters play supporting roles) and their confrontations with hopelessness and the forging of their identities—most often in a world where they lack role models, paths to freedom, and any vision of reality other than that determined by their environment. This “literary naturalism” in settings sometimes involves the battlefield (as in Fallen Angels and Sunrise over Fallujah), but the protagonists usually hail from Myers’s own Harlem. Harlem itself is a paradoxical metaphor in many of Myers’ novels: a place of both damnation and redemption. In the crucible of inner-city poverty, his protagonists are made or broken.

A prominent theme recognized by critics in Myers’s fiction is the desperate need for male bonding in some form—through surrogate father figures (in the absence of effective parents), through characters’ reinvention of themselves as fathers or older brothers, or through the negotiation of friendship—for the male hero to self-actualize and create a moral core that transcends environment. In his analysis of four of Myers’s novels, literary critic Dennis Vellucci asserts that within such settings, Myers’s protagonists face crises that threaten their self-growth and the building of moral character and yet, more often than not, they muster the strength “to retain an innate sensitivity…and to avoid or reject the gang membership, violent behavior, and illegal activity” characteristic of their milieu. In their conflicts with their environment, Myers’s central characters define who they are, mature, and discover internal truths. Myers thus offers hope and a possible blueprint for young black readers.

A particular strength of Myers’s style is his unerring ear for the resonances of the street life, which he portrays through his characters’ voices. Characters are clearly delineated not only by what they say but also by how they speak. Rudine Sims Bishop notes Myers’s ability to “capture the way urban African-American teenagers…talk to each other.” Furthermore, she asserts that “these kinds of oral expressions come out of traditional African American discourse styles.” In short, through his characters, Myers replicates the rhythms and cadences of black teenage culture—a culture overlooked both by its participants and by other, nonblack, youths.

Another aspect of Myers’s engaging style is his ability to create characters who evoke the reader’s sympathy and empathy, often through humor. Even though sometimes crass, with a tough-guy persona, Pee Wee Gates in Fallen Angels is a supremely endearing character whose humor enables him and the protagonist to “get through” combat—and their lives. Finally, Myers’s novels present realistic plots with complex and layered themes that touch on issues that are important for black youth today: how one connects to oneself and one’s culture in a social milieu that builds failure and almost insurmountable obstacles into the process of growing up.

Scorpions

Scorpions, a novel widely read in middle schools and high schools, chronicles the coming-of-age of seventh-grader Jamal, who he is forced to define his “manhood” without the examples of any truly upright role models. Jamal must decide—under negative duress—whether to assume his now-imprisoned brother’s role in a gang. In his descent into desperation, Jamal allows a gun, rather than his conscience or his moral friend Tito, to define his budding manhood.

The novel is dark, providing no true resolution for the hero and leaving the reader with a sense of both boys’ terrible price for misguided behavior: a profound loss of innocence. The boys have become “men” in the worst sense of the word—stripped of illusions about themselves and the world’s possibilities. This Newbery Honor Book serves as an unrelenting and stark cautionary tale.

Fallen Angels

Often termed Myers’s “classic” war story, Fallen Angels is taught in many high schools in the United States despite controversies that have arisen about its graphic violence and use of “indecent” language. Students are captivated by the novel’s vivid characters, realistic portrayal of the Vietnam War, and powerful themes. The title invites complex interpretation: It refers to the innocent soldiers (angels) who have “fallen” (died), but it also illuminates the protagonist’s sense of falling from grace once he has killed other human beings. A subordinate theme is revealed by the paralleling (via flashbacks) of the graphic violence of the war with the terrible violence of the urban Harlem neighborhood in which protagonist Richard Perry grew up.

Perry is a thoughtful hero who naïvely accepts being drafted into the Army (despite a misplaced medical release that would have prevented him from serving) as a way out of crushing poverty and a means to be a role model for his younger brother, Kenny, back home. As the war progresses, Perry experiences his own coming-of-age, reaching a rather ambivalent peace within himself about life, right and wrong, and the importance of vulnerability and dependence in friendship—while witnessing for the reader the disturbing aspects of a war that was undefined and ultimately seen as fruitless. It is interesting to note that Myers later produced a “sequel” of sorts in Sunrise over Fallujah, with another year, another war (Iraq), and another narrator—Perry’s nephew, Robin.

Monster

In its style, Monster is something of a departure for Myers. The novel presents a complex, ambiguous representation of “reality,” forcing the reader to interact with the differing layers of text—one is a handwritten journal/memoir retelling of events, and the other a neatly typed developing screenplay that is not only stylized (as opposed to the raw, seemingly honest handwritten text) but also utilizes the language of film (long shot, close-up, panning across the room) that the budding screenwriter places as part of the text. Thus, from the outset, the “text” and its “truth” are presented as ambiguous in the most basic sense of that word (capable of two meanings). This ambiguity underscores the lack of a definitive meaning of “guilt” as seen through the eyes of both the reader and the protagonist, who ponders if he is truly the “monster” he is accused of being.

Steve Harmon, the protagonist, is being tried for complicity in a murder that took place while Steve was standing as lookout on a robbery. During the trial and his incarceration, Steve ruminates on the desperate plight of the accused—susceptible to the constant threat of violence by other prisoners—while creating cinematically (through the screenplay) an ever-changing physical scenario that questions what the image (artificially created or envisioned) means. This questioning further ripples into questions about how society views the accused (especially the black youth) and, by extension, how the accused comes to terms with his “guilt”—be it actual guilt or simply submitting to an image (tough guy, criminal) that society demands of its oppressed. Myers does not solve the problem for readers, producing a suspenseful, confounding drama that allows no heroes to emerge.

One of Myers’s prominent themes—how young African Americans build their identities in an image-laden, socially antagonistic society—rears its head here in a more provocative and thought-provoking manner than in his other novels. Steve’s “guilt” remains open-ended and, as John Staunton asserts in a review of Monster, “the novel confronts the white middle-class fear of black youth as public menace and places Steve’s story within the troubled history of that image.”

Bibliography

1 

Bishop, Rudine Sims. Presenting Walter Dean Myers. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Provides an introduction to the author and his works through the 1980’s, addressing Myers’s unique contribution as the only African American writer of fiction for young adults who worked to fill an obvious gap in literature relevant to young black readers.

2 

Marler, Myrna Dee. Walter Dean Myers. New York: Greenwood Press, 2008. Reference work aimed at both students and teachers provides insights into Myers’s themes and characters.

3 

Murray, Beth. “Defending Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers: Framing—Not Taming—Controversy.” In Censored Books II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985-2000, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Examines the controversy surrounding teaching the novel in high school because of its depiction of violence and graphic language among soldiers. Asserts that Myers’s “mission” is not wanton brutality but a presentation of a coming-of-age story that reflects the global issues involved.

4 

Patrick-Wexler, Diane. Walter Dean Myers. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996. Offers a glowing description of the author in words and pictures formulated for the elementary to middle school reader.

5 

Sickels, Amy. Walter Dean Myers. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. Volume aimed at young readers (part of a series titled Who Wrote That?) provides biographical information and a chronology of Myers’s life. Includes photographs.

6 

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Walter Dean Myers: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Provides a good introduction to Myers’s work. Alphabetically arranged entries cover characters, events, and themes in Myers’s fiction. Includes informative appendixes.

7 

Vellucci, Dennis. “Man to Man: Portraits of the Male Adolescent in the Novels of Walter Dean Myers.” In African-American Voices in Young Adult Literature: Tradition, Transition, Transformation, edited by Karen Patricia Smith. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994. Essay on Myers’s work is part of a collection of essays devoted to the issues addressed in the works of prominent writers of young adult literature.

8 

Zitlow, Connie S. Teaching the Selected Works of Walter Dean Myers. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2007. Work designed for high school teachers provides ideas for connecting students with the text. Students can also benefit from the examination of Myers’s imagery, poetic language, and form. In-depth analyses are provided for Monster, Street Love, and Fallen Angels, among other works.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Morton-Mollo, Sherry. "Walter Dean Myers." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_14510141000072.
APA 7th
Morton-Mollo, S. (2010). Walter Dean Myers. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Morton-Mollo, Sherry. "Walter Dean Myers." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.