Portside

Walter Dean Myers, a best-selling children's book author whose crystalline prose often depicted the gritty lives of young people, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 76.

His death, at Beth Israel Medical Center, followed a brief illness, his son Christopher said.

Mr. Myers was a three-time National Book Award nominee, received the Coretta Scott King Book Award for African-American fiction five times and from 2012 to 2013 served as national ambassador for young people's literature, a position created in part by the Library of Congress.

In books that included "Monster," "Lockdown" and "Fallen Angels," he often painted portraits of young African-Americans who battled troubles in the streets, in school and at home.

Mr. Myers, who lived in Jersey City, visited schools and prisons around the country. He often met young people whose poverty and lack of direction reminded him of his own experience.

"He wrote about disenfranchised black kids, particularly boys, and he wrote about them with extraordinary honesty and also with compassion," Avi, a children's book author and a longtime friend of Mr. Myers, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Besides his books, his legacy is his compassionate identity with these young people."

Avi (who uses only one name) recalled visiting young people in a Virginia prison a decade ago. He received a tepid reception. Then the young prisoners asked him if he knew anyone famous.

Avi mentioned Mr. Myers. "They sat straight up and shouted, `You know him! What is he like?' " Avi recalled. "They were readers."

Walter Milton Myers was born on Aug. 12, 1937, in Martinsburg, W.Va. The fourth of five siblings, he was 18 months old when his mother died. His father, George, sent Walter to live with his first wife, Florence Dean, a cleaning woman and factory worker, and her husband, Herbert Dean. The couple reared Mr. Myers in Harlem, and he took the pen name Walter Dean Myers to honor them. By middle school he was over six feet tall and playing basketball.

But painfully shy, a stutterer and facing bleak prospects as an man in the segregation era, Mr. Myers dropped out of the elite Stuyvesant High School and joined the Army on his 17th birthday. He wrote in his memoir, "Bad Boy" (2001), that books were his friends as he fought despair.

"There were two very distinct voices going on in my head, and I moved easily between them," he wrote of his teenage years. "One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male." The other voice, he said, "the one I hid from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature."

After serving three years in the Army he was, he acknowledged, drinking heavily while working in construction, as a messenger on Wall Street and in other jobs. But he also began writing, eventually contributing to Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazine and to sports publications. When his half-brother Wayne was killed in Vietnam, he wrote a tribute for Essence magazine.

His first book, "Where Does the Day Go?," was published in 1969 after he won a children's literature contest for minority writers.

Mr. Myers wrote more than 100 books on a wide array of subjects, including the war in Iraq and an African princess.

"Lockdown," a National Book Award finalist, came about after Mr. Myers met a youth who was afraid of getting into trouble again after prison. In "Monster," it was unclear if the young narrator had actually committed the crime - the killing of a Harlem drugstore owner - that sent him to prison.

Mr. Myers always said he understood desperation.

"In the dark times, when my uncle was murdered, when my family became dysfunctional with alcohol and grief, or when I realized that our economics would not allow me to go to college I began to despair," Mr. Myers wrote in March in an essay on the front page of The New York Times's Sunday Review section, titled "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" He turned to literature - Balzac, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller - but longed for black characters. Discovering  "Sonny's Blues," a story by James Baldwin about black people in Harlem, "humanized me," he wrote.

"Books transmit values," he wrote in the essay. "They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?"

In addition to his son Christopher, his survivors include his wife, Constance; another son, Michael; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. A daughter, Karen, died earlier.

Mr. Myers continued to write, "even from his hospital bed," Christopher Myers said on Thursday. "He often joked that when he passed away there would still be books coming out in his name."

True to his prediction, Mr. Myers has three books scheduled for posthumous publication. The futuristic novel "On a Clear Day" is to come out in September and "Juba," a novel based on the life of a 19th-century tap dancer, in April 2015. A graphic novel of "Monster" is also to be published next year.