John Myers Myers
John Myers Myers was an American author born on January 11, 1906, in Northport, New York. He had a diverse career, working as a newspaper reporter, copywriter, and even trying his hand at hog farming before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. His literary journey began with his first novel, *The Harp and the Blade* (1941), a modern prose romance, followed by *Out on Any Limb* (1942), a historical novel set in Elizabethan England. Myers gained significant recognition for his novel *Silverlock* (1949), which features a hero's quest through a fantastical Commonwealth populated by legendary and literary figures. His later works include *The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter* (1981), which similarly explores literary encounters.
Myers also focused on the mythology of the Old West, producing works like *The Alamo* (1948) and *Dead Warrior* (1956), which blend fiction with historical documentary. These contributions enriched the narrative of the Wild West, influencing other writers in the genre. He published several volumes of poetry centered on Western themes and continued to shape the literary landscape until his death on October 30, 1988.
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John Myers Myers
Author
- Born: January 11, 1906
- Birthplace: Northport, New York
- Died: October 30, 1988
Biography
John Myers Myers was born on January 11, 1906, in Northport, New York. He was educated at St Stephen’s College, Middlebury College in Vermont, and the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. Between the late 1920’s and the early 1940’s, he worked as a newspaper reporter, including stints on the New York World and San Antonio News, and as an advertising copywriter, and he briefly dabbled in hog farming. He served in the U.S. Army’s Second Armored Division during World War II, earning promotion from the ranks. He married Charlotte Shanahan in 1943; they had two daughters, Celia and Anne. He was a lecturer and writers’ conference director at Arizona State University, Tempe, in 1948 and 1949 and organized a collection of Western Americana for the Arizona State University library.
Myers’s first novel, The Harp and the Blade (1941), is a modern prose romance which tells the story of a medieval minstrel traveling in France, laboring under a curse commanding him to altruism. The minstrel forms a temporary alliance with a warrior hero intent on overthrowing a tyrant. His second novel, Out on Any Limb (1942), is a historical novel set in Elizabethan England in which the hero attempts to recover the heroine’s stolen estates. The Wild Yazoo (1947), his first Western novel, set the pattern for his later career.
Myers’s most successful work was Silverlock (1949), which tells of its eponymous hero’s adventures in the Commonwealth, a patchwork compounded from the substance of miscellaneous myths and literary scenarios. The main strand of Silverlock’s plot is a quest for the wisdom- conferring fount of Hippocrene, a convenient artifice for hurrying the hero through a series of brief encounters with famous legendary and literary characters. The consequent tour, ranging from visits with Homer through William Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll, is a lively account of the rewards of half a a lifetime’s reading. It is more earnestly complemented by The Moon’s Fire-Eating Daughter (1981), which features a similar series of encounters involving authors rather than characters. Its hero, recruited by a company of deities to carry out a survey of “the Road,” meets Homer, Aeschylus, Edmund Spenser, Miguel de Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and many others.
After Silverlock, Myers took up the thread initiated in The Wild Yazoo and his nonfictional account The Alamo (1948), concerning himself primarily with the mythology of the Old West. However, none of his later works in that vein took the form of generic Western fiction. His Western novels Dead Warrior (1956) and I, Jack Swilling, Founder of Phoenix, Arizona (1961) are fictionalized historical documentaries more closely akin to his nonfiction books The Last Chance: Tombstone’s Early Years (1950), Doc Holliday (1955), and The Deaths of the Bravos (1962) than to his fantasies. Such books, however, served as imaginative fuel for other Western writers, and his account of the history of Tombstone made a considerable contribution to one of the central myths of the Wild West. He also published three volumes of poetry on Western themes. Myers died on October 30, 1988.