Bad Boy: A Memoir

Bad Boy is a 2001 memoir spanning roughly the first seventeen years of YA writer Walter Dean Myers’s life. In it, Myers explores how the time he spent growing up in a mixed-race, working-class family in 1940s-and-50s Harlem impacted his eventual career as a writer.

To do so, Myers first explains his complicated family history: Myers’s biological parents were both black, but he was adopted at a very young age by his father’s first wife, Florence—a half-German, half-Native American woman who later remarried a black man named Herbert Dean. Myers adored his adoptive parents, and fondly recalls how his mother instilled an early love of language in him by reading aloud to him in their “sun-drenched Harlem kitchen” (14).

Despite his strong reading skills, Myers initially had trouble in school, largely thanks to a speech impediment that made him the target of bullying. In turn, Myers would lash out at his attackers and get into trouble himself. As he moved through elementary school, however, teachers began to recognize his potential and take steps to help him succeed by providing him with books to read, enrolling him in speech-therapy classes, and eventually moving him to an accelerated class that would allow him to graduate early.