Walter Dean Myers is one of modern literature's foremost authors of fiction for black teenagers. His stories are concerned mostly with the tragedies and triumphs of growing up in difficult environments. "I'm drawn to the eternal promise of childhood, and the flair of the young for capturing the essence of life."¹

Myers was born on August 12, 1937 to George Ambrose and Mary Green Myers. "Where does life begin? I discount the idea that life has a strictly biological beginning. Sometime between the snatching of an unknown African from his native land and this writing, somewhere between the long forgotten past and the confusing present, the person that I perceive as Self came into being.

"I don't remember being born in 1937 in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There are records that indicate that I was and I accept them. I sent for a birth certificate some years ago and I received a...