Monster Study Guide

Walter Dean Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1937. When his mother died when he was two years old, Myers went to live with Florence Dean, his biological father’s first wife, and her husband Herbert Dean, who raised him in Harlem, New York City. Myers eventually changed his middle name from Milton to Dean to honor their parentage. His childhood was dominated by his church and his local neighborhood. Although he was an avid reader, Myers struggled both socially and academically, in part due to a speech impediment which made him a frequent target for bullies, which in turn earned Myers a reputation for frequently getting into fistfights. One of Myers high school teachers sensed that he would not graduate but knew that he was a gifted reader and writer, and encouraged him to continue writing no matter what he did or where he went. True to his teacher’s prediction, Myers dropped out of high school as soon as he turned 17 and joined the army, serving for three years and exiting shortly before the start of the Vietnam War. Myers was an avid reader throughout, but bothered by the fact that all of his literary heroes were white people. However, after coming across the works of African-American author James Baldwin, Myers felt encouraged to write about the experience of being a black person in mid-20th century America. Remembering his teacher’s words, Myers began spending his evening writing after finishing his day labor on construction sites. Myers’s first published book was the children’s book Where Does the Day Go? in 1968, which won a Council on Interracial Books for Children Award. Myers went on to spend the next 45 years writing books, publishing more than 100 children’s books, young adult novels, and nonfiction books. He won the prestigious Coretta Scott King Award. recognizing African-American authors, five different times. His 1988 Vietnam War novel Fallen Angels is recognized by the American Library Association as one of the most frequently targeted books for censorship in America due to its unflinching depiction of the Vietnam War. After a lucrative writing career and seeing one of his sons, Christopher Myers, become an accomplished author and illustrator himself, Walter Dean Myers died after a short illness in a hospital in Manhattan at the age of 76.

Harlem has existed in various forms since the 17th century, when the Dutch used it as a trading post, and has been everything from a farming town to resort destination to ghetto to cultural center. However, the 20 years between 1970 to 1990 were considered by many to be the neighborhood’s hardest. As crime rose and the local economy fell, those with the money to move out of Harlem mostly did so, leaving the poorest behind. Businesses and stores shuttered, housing fell into disrepair, and within a two-year period alone nearly a third of Harlem’s total population left the neighborhood. Infant mortality was double that of the rest of New York City. In 1991, the New York Times reported, “Nearly two-thirds of the households have incomes below $10,000 a year. In a community with one of the highest crime rates in the city, garbage-strewn vacant lots and tumbledown tenements, many of them abandoned and sealed, contribute to the sense of danger and desolation that pervades much of the area.” However, beginning in the late 1980s, city officials and generous individuals—including professional basketball player Magic Johnson—launched a series of initiatives and investments to begin restoring Harlem’s central 125th street, repairing buildings, building supermarkets and convenience stores, and slowly reinvigorating the local economy. Monster takes place during the period of Harlem’s revitalization, when it was much more dangerous than it is today.

Monster primarily explores themes relating to incarceration, injustice, and being poor or black or both in America’s inner-cities. Many of Myers’s numerous other works explore similar topics, but perhaps the most striking, since it directly relays his own childhood experience, is his memoir Bad Boy, which recounts Myers’ childhood in Harlem. In the same vein, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me tells the story of his similarly difficult childhood in Baltimore as he recounts the events of his life to his son and explains to him what it means to be a black man in America, particularly in light of the disadvantages and injustices he will face. Coates’s memoir is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and as a result of his nonfiction mastery he is sometimes referred to as the modern-day James Baldwin. Monster also explores dynamics of prison life and what that does to a person’s psyche, regardless of race. A useful addition to Monster’s exploration of the American justice system would be the highly-regarded In the Belly of the Beast, a book composed of letters written by longtime-convict Jack Abbott to the journalist and author Norman Mailer, which describes Abbott’s experience and analysis of what he regarded as a brutal and utterly unjust prison system, much like Steve Harmon recognizes in Myers’s novel.