97 pages • 3 hours read
Bad Boy: A Memoir
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Essay Topics
Reread the following passage: “I didn’t want to be defiant. I wanted to be in the system that I was walking away from, but I didn’t know how to get in” (132). What makes Myers a “bad boy”? In what ways is his “badness” a reflection of the society he grows up in?
How does Myers form his views on race as a boy? How do these views change over time?
What attracts Myers to reading and writing? How does each impact the way he views himself?
As a young man, Myers spends a lot of time thinking about masculinity, and how factors like race and class affect it. What does Bad Boy ultimately suggest about what it means to “be a man”?
Choose one of the works Myers describes reading as a boy and describe how it might have influenced the topic, tone, or themes of Bad Boy.
How does Myers characterize Harlem? What role does Harlem play in Myers’s development?
Discuss the role the Dodgers play in Bad Boy. How does Myers use the team to underscore themes, plot points, etc.?
Describe Florence Dean. What makes her so central to Myers’s story?
Compare and contrast Myers’s voice as a narrator with his words and actions as a child and teenager. What is Myers’s attitude towards his younger self?
Why do you think Bad Boy more or less ends with Myers leaving for the Army, only briefly touching on his years as an adult?
Unlock all 97 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Walter Dean Myers
