NEW YORK TIMES, January 3, 2012 — On the rough-edged streets of Harlem in the 1940s, the young Walter Dean Myers knew better than to carry his library books where other children could see them.
“I was teased if I brought my books home,” said Mr. Myers, now a prolific and award-winning children’s book author. “I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me — because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.”
On Tuesday Mr. Myers, 74, will be named the national ambassador for young people’s literature, a sort of poet laureate of the children’s book world who tours the country for two years, speaking at schools and libraries about reading and literacy.
As an African-American man who dropped out of high school but built a successful writing career — largely because of his lifelong devotion to books — Mr. Myers said his message would be etched by his own experiences.
“I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life,” he said in an interview at his book-cluttered house here in Jersey City, adding that he hoped to speak directly to low-income minority parents. “You take a black man who doesn’t have a job, but you say to him, ‘Look, you can make a difference in your child’s life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.’ That’s what I would like to do.”
Mr. Myers is the third person to be appointed to the post, which was created in 2008 and is chosen by a committee formed by two groups: the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Children’s Book Council, a trade association for children’s book publishers. He succeeds Katherine Paterson, the novelist best known for her “Bridge to Terabithia,” and the first appointee, Jon Scieszka, author of books including “The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.”
The choice of Mr. Myers represents a departure from his predecessors and is likely to be seen as a bold statement. His books chronicle the lives of many urban teenagers, especially young, poor African-Americans. While his body of work includes poetry, nonfiction and the occasional cheerful picture book for children, its standout books offer themes aimed at young-adult readers: stories of teenagers in violent gangs, soldiers headed to Iraq and juvenile offenders imprisoned for their crimes.
While many young-adult authors shy away from such risky subject material, Mr. Myers has used his books to confront the darkness and despair that fill so many children’s lives.
But he does so, critics say, with a sense of possibility. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2008, Leonard S. Marcus praised Mr. Myers’s body of work. “Drugs, drive-by shootings, gang warfare, wasted lives — Myers has written about all these subjects with nuanced understanding and a hard-won, qualified sense of hope,” Mr. Marcus wrote.
Robin Adelson, the executive director of the Children’s Book Council, said that while there was a hard edge to Mr. Myers’s writing, there was also the message of holding yourself up and believing in what you can do.
“I think part of what makes him such a great choice for this post is that his writing is a little bit of everything,” she said. “There’s this interest in history and this deep knowledge of history in Walter’s writing. Then there’s this definite hard-core, hard-edged realism.”
His appointment could be viewed as another volley in a debate that intensified last year about young adult literature and whether it is too grim, too dark and too violent for the age group. An essay in The Wall Street Journal in June by Meghan Cox Gurdon questioned contemporary teenage fiction that “can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is.”
But Jennifer Brown, a member of the ambassadorship selection committee and the children’s editor for Shelf Awareness, an industry newsletter, said: “With Walter’s work, he’s very responsible about conveying enough to give you a sense of the grittiness, but there’s not a lot of graphic violence. With Walter’s books, it’s much more about the emotional impact of the violence that these kids grow up around. It’s not a fantasy.”
Mr. Myers’s own biography provides a glimpse into the experiences that shape his work. Born Walter Milton Myers in West Virginia in 1937, he was given away by his father to a couple, Florence and Herbert Dean, after his mother died when he was a small child. They moved to Harlem with Walter, who later added the middle name Dean in their honor.
Reading was not an integral part of his home life. Herbert Dean worked as a janitor and was illiterate. Florence Dean cleaned houses and was employed in a button factory.
But by the age of 5, Mr. Myers was learning to read through whatever material he found at home. Mrs. Dean sometimes read him “true romance” magazines, full of short stories. Comic books from his older sisters provided more reading material.
In fourth grade he published his first poem in the school yearbook, igniting a lifelong love of poetry. Sitting in an easy chair in his living room on a recent afternoon, Mr. Myers recited its lines with a laugh:
“I know a lady oh so fair.
To me she gives such loving care.
I love that lady like no other.
Because that lady is my mother.”
When he saw it in the yearbook, “I ran all the way home, I was so excited,” Mr. Myers said.
But by the time he entered his teens, his home life had become a tremendous distraction. An uncle was murdered, sending Mr. Dean into a deep depression. Mrs. Dean, who had long struggled with drinking, became a full-blown alcoholic. And the young Walter, while praised by his teachers for his quick mind and reading ability, began to flounder at school.
“I wasn’t showing up,” he said. “My thinking capacity fell off a cliff. My head was totally, completely filled up with what my thing was at home.” Mr. Myers enlisted in the Army on his 17th birthday, dropping out of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
After serving in the Army, he found his way back to writing. Mystery magazines published his submissions, earning him $5 or $10 checks. Then he entered — and won — a contest for writing a picture book. (In the meantime he held down jobs at the Postal Service and an employment office, among other places.) Since then his books have won the Coretta Scott King Award and the Michael L. Printz Award. “Monster,” the story of a young Harlem man’s trial for murder, was a National Book Award finalist in 1999.
As ambassador, Mr. Myers will appear at Children’s Book Week in New York in May and at the National Book Festival in Washington. He will receive a medal at the Library of Congress next Tuesday. One of the first things he expects to say is that reading is not a Victorian pastime.
“People still try to sell books that way — as ‘books can take you to foreign lands,’ ” he said. “We’ve given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Tuesday, January 3rd 2012 at 10:59PM
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