Myers' subsequent works continued to take an uncompromising look at the plights and issues of urban African-American youth, drawing upon his own experiences while growing up in Harlem. By 1977, he had left Bobbs-Merrill and was writing full time. His book, which featured children of various ethnic backgrounds theorizing about the nature of night and day, won the contest, and Myers decided to pursue success in children's literature, while working as an editor at Bobs-Merrill publishing. Spurred by the wish to write something of consequence, he submitted a children's picture book entitled Where Does the Day Go? (1967) to a writing contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Mystery magazines published his submissions, earning him $5 or $10 checks. Already an avid writer, he had submitted work to magazines, tabloids, advertising copy, and other avenues of publication. Myers moved to Indianapolis to join the editorial staff of Bobbs-Merrill publishing house in 1969. I began writing at night and eventually began writing about the most difficult period of my own life, the teen years. "But, years later, working on a construction job in New York, I remembered her words. "I didn't know exactly what that meant," he said of his high school teacher's advice. After military service, Myers worked a string of jobs while attending the City College of the City University of New York and continuing to submit short works to various periodicals. 'It's what you do,' she said." Myers dropped out of high school in 1954 at age seventeen and served in the army until his discharge in 1957.
She advised me to keep on writing no matter what happened to me. "I wrote well in high school," Myers writes on his website, "And a teacher (bless her!) recognized this and also knew I was going to drop out. In Bad Boy: A Memoir (2001), he related that he was a good student, but his foster family lacked the finances to send him to college.
In fourth grade, Myers published his first poem in the school yearbook, igniting a lifelong love of poetry. He eventually incorporated the Dean family name as part of his own.Ī speech impediment prompted the young Myers to begin collecting his thoughts in poems and short stories. Florence, a native of New Franklin, Pennsylvania, via German emigration, raised him as her own in the Harlem neighborhood, which informed most of his later work. However, he spent most of his childhood in New York after his mother died when he was three years old and his father entrusted him to his first wife, Florence, who adopted him in partnership with her husband, Herbert Dean. Walter Milton Myers was born into an impoverished family in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1937. For current information, see the Abstract for links.
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