Walter Dean Myers was born in
West Virginia in 1937.
Myers’s mother died three years after his birth, and his father,
too poor to raise him, put him into foster care. His foster parents
lived in the African-American neighborhood of Harlem in New York
City, and he spent most of his childhood and young adulthood there.
Though Myers describes his young life as happy—filled with basketball
games, a loving upbringing, and good books—he suffered from a speech
impediment that made it difficult for him to communicate with others,
and at first filled him with rage. Unable to reach out verbally,
Myers turned to writing, pouring out his thoughts in poems and short
stories. He spent hours in the public library, reading anything
he could get his hands on. By the time Myers reached high school,
he knew he had intellectual potential, but also knew that his family
was too poor to send him to college. Discouraged, he dropped out
of school at age fifteen, and though he was persuaded to return,
he dropped out again at sixteen. In 1954, on
his seventeenth birthday, he joined the army.
Upon his release from the army, Myers had few job skills
and little education, and he still suffered from his speech impediment.
He took a job loading trucks and then worked in a number of odd
jobs in places such as the New York State Department of Labor, a
post office, and a rehabilitation center. Myers also kept writing
throughout this time, submitting his work to various magazines and
periodicals. In 1969,
Myers’s career received a boost when his novel Where Does
a Day Go? won a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial
Books for Children. Since then, Myers has been able to support himself
with his writing, turning out a large number of books for children
and young adults. Two of Myers’s novels have won the Newbery Honor
Award, and five, including Fallen Angels, have
earned him the Coretta Scott King Award. In addition to prose fiction,
Myers has written poetry and nonfiction work for young adults. In 1984,
more than two decades after leaving high school, he graduated from
Empire State College. He currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey,
where he writes full time and volunteers in local schools.
Myers has drawn heavily from his own life experiences
in writing his novels. He has frequently written about basketball,
one of his favorite pastimes, and has set many of his works in his
familiar childhood neighborhood of Harlem. Like Richie Perry in Fallen Angels, Myers
joined the army as a teenager. Despite this frequent reliance on
his own experience, however, Myers has also incorporated a number
of historical and foreign settings in his novels. Fallen Angels takes
place in Vietnam, a theater of war in which Myers never served since
he was in the army too early.
The Vietnam War lasted from 1959 to 1973.
The United States reached its highest level of involvement in the
war in approximately 1967,
the year in which Fallen Angels is set. The conflict
arose from American fears that the Communist regime in North Vietnam
might conquer the southern part of the country, unifying the two
halves under Communist leadership. Though many saw the Vietnam War as
essentially a civil war and believed the United States should not have
become involved, the United States government believed intervention
was necessary to stop the spread of Communism. This idea was called
the domino theory, since it focused on the possibility that if South
Vietnam fell under Communist control, all of Southeast Asia would
follow, in effect setting off a Communist chain reaction throughout
many countries. The Americans assisted the South Vietnamese with
military advice, modern weapons technology, massive bombing campaigns,
and combat troops, which at first seemed successful in pushing back
the Communist forces. However, the guerilla tactics of the North
Vietnamese proved surprisingly resilient to modern American methods
of warfare, and the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1973,
failing to accomplish its goal. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam,
fell to Communist rule in 1975.
