In 1968, his picture-book manuscript for “Where Does the Day Go” won a contest for black writers by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. By then, after a stint in the Army, he was writing seriously. “In truth, everything in my life in 1951 that was personal and had value was white,” Walter Dean Myers later wrote in his memoir “Bad Boy.” It wasn’t until he reached adulthood and read “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin, a fellow Harlemite, that he felt he had permission to offer the world a narrative with blackness at its core. A boy whose questing intelligence was engaged in a long and complicated conversation with the books he read, books that made him feel more real than his real life did but that were also silent about black boys like him.
A boy who read voraciously - Mark Twain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce - even after he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School in New York. A boy who stumbled over his words but moved with perfect grace on the basketball court. A tall, athletic boy who fought with other kids and threw books around the classroom and talked when he wasn’t supposed to.
A distracted, disruptive boy - a bad boy, his teachers said. He would check out books from the library and carry them home, hidden in brown paper bags in order to avoid other boys' teasing. As a boy, Walter Dean Myers was quick-tempered and always ready for a fight.
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