He also received an unprecedented six Coretta Scott King Book Awards and the inaugural Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement. He's had two Newbery Honor Books and a Caldecott Medal, and was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award. (Yeh says Myers liked to make pâté for his cat.)īy the time he died, Myers had been showered with almost all the awards a YA author could get. He was also, says Phoebe Yeh, publisher of Crown Books for Young Readers, 'a Renaissance man.' He played several musical instruments and was a Le Cordon Bleu-trained cook. Myers was an indefatigable circuit rider for readers and literature, wherever the cause took him, to juvenile hall or the richly set tables at literary fundraisers. He said in several interviews that he liked to spend time with the kids who didn't receive visitors - the boys who seem to have been forgotten - to tell them not to give up. He made a practice of visiting young men in juvenile detention centers. And he got teased a lot for having a speech impediment.Īnd he often saw himself in them. He was one of those kids who was intelligent, but not academically inclined. He was already a rabid reader when he started school at Public School 125. 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. 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. 12, 1937, in Martinsburg, W.Va., but he didn't stay there long. I write books for the troubled boy I once was.' Somehow I always go back to the most turbulent periods of my own life. 'It gave me permission to write about my own experiences.

'A turning point for me was the discovery of a short story by James Baldwin about the black urban experience,' Myers wrote. 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. Myers wrote more than 100 books, most of them in the genre of fiction for young adults (YA). He expanded the face of publishing so that many children of color saw themselves reflected in his work.

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. Author Walter Dean Myers tours his old Harlem neighborhood in New York, Dec.

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