Fountain of Stories for Youth

If the sociologists are to be believed, Walter Dean Myers was a demographic disaster waiting to happen. Living in what is politely called rural poverty in West Virginia, his father had many children by almost as many women. Myers was just a year old when his mother died and his father literally gave him away to a couple who moved him to Harlem.

There, on New York City’s hard streets, he gave his foster parents a terrible time. “I was always in trouble,” he said, half boasting, half regretting. He hung out with gangs. He was “sort of” arrested. It didn’t help that he had a serious speech impediment. No one could understand what he said. Myers responded by being angry all the time.

So with only the slightest shift in life’s winds, Walter Dean Myers might have become another sad statistic from the place where he grew up. Instead, he became a giant of contemporary literature for young people. “Fallen Angels,” his 1988 novel about Vietnam, is widely considered a classic, a work often compared to masterpieces of the adult Vietnam genre like Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” or Tim O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato.”

By choosing to write for kids, the 60-year-old Myers also became an anomaly: a male writer in a field dominated by women; an African American in a genre that for years was almost exclusively white. He became, with countless awards and more than 50 titles for young people, an inadvertent phenomenon, a writer with so many projects in progress at any one moment that he keeps track of them on a flow-chart posted in his kitchen.

“I don’t know how he gets so many ideas,” love-grumbled his wife Constance, an artist. “Every two seconds or so, he’ll say, ‘Oh, I got an idea.’ It’s very annoying.”

One idea that had been brewing probably since Myers moved north as a baby was “Harlem,” a stunning paean to the community his publisher, Scholastic, calls “this crucible of American culture.” Myers’ 23-year-old son, Christopher, provided the lush collage illustrations that accompany this celebration of the historic center of African American life:

Yellow/tan/brown/black/red

Green/gray/bright

Colors loud enough to be heard

Light on asphalt streets

Sun yellow shirts on burnt umber

Bodies

Demanding to be heard, seen

Soon after the book was published this spring, it became clear that adults were buying “Harlem” for themselves, not just for children. Readers of all ages were drawn by Myers’ memories of a boyhood rich in “bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythm of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.” For along with a precarious relationship with Harlem’s street life half a century ago, Myers recalls abundant love and encouragement in his early years.

It was his foster mother, barely literate herself, who taught him to read. Every day, she sat him down and read out loud from “True Romance” magazine. Myers soon moved on to comic books. But when he tried reading comics in class, his teacher caught him and tore them up. The next day, she brought him a pile of books from her own library. “That was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Myers said. When Myers first visited the public library, he thought he’d found Nirvana. “I couldn’t believe my luck in discovering that what I loved most--reading--was free,” he said.

Still, with his speech problems and his attitude, Myers continued to clash with authorities. In sixth grade, a tough teacher named Irwin Lasher, a former Marine, decided to make Myers his rescue project. “He spent the entire year telling me I was bright,” Myers remembered. “He was idealistic, decent and tough. And it worked.” Myers began to write, short stories and little poems. For the first time in his life, he won steady praise. By high school, he’d decided he was an intellectual.

But there was no way, no prayer on a hot Harlem day, that college was in his future. At 17, Myers dropped out of high school and joined the Army. Years of pickup basketball in Morningside Park served him well, and the 6-foot-2-inch recruit found himself a star on an Army team. Their colonel was betting heavily on the ballplayers, and when the team lost its tournament in the finals, he shipped the players to the Arctic as punishment. Myers was young. He loved every frozen minute of it.

But, then he was out of the Army. What was he going to do? He knocked around, loading trucks, “really pissy jobs,” finally landing a laborer’s job with the post office. “I wanted to do something else, so I decided to try writing. It was cheap, no overhead,” Myers said. “You didn’t have to have success. I could think of myself as a writer, even a would-be writer, rather than a truck-loader.”

Myers had it in his mind that he would become the Great American Novelist, “the one that everyone was going to whisper about when they came into the restaurant.” But he first needed to get published. He started wearing a beret and hanging out with other writers. He also began to write for “the scandal sheets,” publications like the National Enquirer. They paid him $15 or $20 per article.

He moved on to men’s magazines, Blue Book, Male, Cavalier. It was the early 1960s, a dicey time in the country’s color consciousness. “But since I was writing, I was facing absolutely no color line,” Myers said. “Nobody knew who I was.” He churned out fiction and nonfiction. “I thought, ‘I can do this stuff,’ ” he recalled. “And I did.”

Of course, he added, “I wasn’t even close to making a living off it.”

Along the line, Myers had sought out a speech therapist, and eliminated that obstacle to communication. One day a novelist friend told him about a job in publishing. Myers said he was crazy: How could he possibly get a job in publishing?

“My friend accused me of being the kind of black person who is always complaining that he doesn’t have a chance. Then when you give him a chance, he doesn’t take it. It was 1970, and they were looking for a black person at this publishing house. I went down and talked to them, and they said, the job is yours.”

All of a sudden, Myers was working at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. “I had an office as big as this living room and a secretary,” he said. “I said, ‘What the hell? What am I doing?’ I didn’t know if I should sit in the office with my jacket on, or with my jacket off. So I developed into this very bad editor.”

His book writing career began when he spotted an ad for a children’s book contest run by the Council on Inter-Racial Books. Myers figured he had nothing to lose. He wrote all the time anyway, why not write for kids? His winning entry, “Where Does the Day Go?” was published by Parents Magazine press. A second book, “The Dancers,” quickly followed. His third book, “The Dragon Takes a Wife,” caused an uproar. Instead of fan mail he got death threats. No one seemed to mind that Myers had taken a traditional medieval tale and moved it to the inner city. What incensed people was the story’s black fairy, Mabel Mae, who made comments like, “Face it, baby, that knight is a bad dude.”

Myers laughed. “The idea that the fairy was black really upset people,” he said. “They thought that the world of children’s books that they had always known would go on as they had always known it.”

Myers ignored the bias and continued to write tough, realistic stories. “Fallen Angels,” based on his brother’s experience, is about a black soldier in Vietnam.

But still he encountered predispositions that disturbed him. “I was still being faced with people who very often didn’t know what I was writing about, people who I would say have liberal ideas which I didn’t always appreciate,” he said. “If I wrote about basketball, that was OK. If I wrote about the inner city in a way they understood, it was OK. There was a formula. A black adult could occasionally help a white child, and a white adult could always help a black child. It’s liberalism, wanting to reach out and help the poor black child, like the missionaries.”

Myers said he has studied the genre carefully, “and in my estimation, in so many books written by blacks, the black is a victim, and has overcome the victim status by being good, or by having some outside person help, usually a white person. People are very sympathetic to that kind of thing.”

On a Brooklyn school visit once, “There was this little kid who came up to me and said he didn’t like to read black books,” Myers said. “So I immediately hopped on my high horse and said, what’s wrong with you, kid? And he said, well, they’re always slaves or victims. And I’m afraid he was right.”

As “a black man in a profession where there aren’t very many black men,” Myers stands out in young people’s literature, said Roger Sutton, editor of the Horn Book, a Boston periodical devoted to children’s books.

But his real strength, said Sutton, is that, “Walter really knows how to tell a boy’s story. You see that a lot in ‘Fallen Angels.’ You see a sense of the interior life of boys and men, really from a male perspective. Walter really does speak to boys. But he never loses sight of the story, that’s the important thing.”

Myers and his wife live amid happy clutter on a busy boulevard here. There are books and historic photographs everywhere, a flute that Myers enjoys playing standing upright in the living room, and somewhere, “this dumb cat,” who inspired a recent yarn about an adventurous feline in 18th century Malaga. “I don’t think anybody’s going to be publishing that story real soon,” Myers said.

Never mind. His list of current projects is daunting enough: “The Amistad,” a “straight nonfiction treatment” to accompany the forthcoming Steven Spielberg film; a story about a dog who plays the blues; a picture series about mothers and children; a collection of short biographies of African Americans such as Malcolm X and a novel called “Monster,” about a boy who is on trial for being involved in a stickup.

There is also “Swan Lake Projects,” in which the famed ballet story takes place in a housing project, a book about black cowboys and a manual that Myers plans to title, “A Handbook for Boys.” Myers calls this last effort “nonfiction philosophy for teenagers,” a kind of guidebook about how young males fit into the larger society around them.

“I’ve been talking to teachers, and they are very enthusiastic about me doing this book,” he said.

Myers begins work each day at 4:30 or 5 a.m. Sporting a vest that weighs 20 pounds, he starts with a five-mile walk. Then he writes 10 pages.

“I so love writing,” Myers said. “It is not something that I am doing just for a living. This is something that I love to do.”