A Study Guide for Walter Dean Myers's "Treasure of Lemon Brown"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Walter Dean Myers's "Treasure of Lemon Brown," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535841535

Book preview

10

The Treasure of Lemon Brown

Walter Dean Myers

1983

Introduction

The The Treasure of Lemon Brown is a coming-of-age story about Greg Ridley, a teenager who learns a lesson about the value of family through an encounter with a homeless man named Lemon Brown. Originally published in a 1983 issue of Boys' Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, the story suggests that boys like Greg, who struggles with school and his father's expectations for success, can find wisdom in unexpected places. Such uplifting messages are not unusual in the work of author Walter Dean Myers, a noted writer of young adult fiction about African Americans. But Myers is also known for depicting the realities and obstacles of everyday life: in The Treasure of Lemon Brown, the urban setting of Harlem is one in which homelessness and violence nearly overshadow the efforts of Greg's family and others to build community.

The story is often anthologized in language arts textbooks, perhaps because it teaches a moral lesson that is neither controversial nor difficult to understand. But the story does not express these high ideals without also emphasizing the difficulty of the real-life strugglesMyers's young readers may face themselves, or may have witnessed in the lives of others. Greg wants to play basketball but cannot pass math; Lemon Brown was once a blues star but now lives on the streets. The happy ending does not resolve these problems but rather shows Greg's discovery of the treasure that family and community support can offer. Though Myers has never re-published this story in any of his own collections, readers can find copies of it in numerous textbooks, including Prentice Hall Literature's Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes (Bronze, Grade 7), McDougal Littell's The Language of Literature (Grade 8), and Glencoe McGraw-Hill's Literature (Course 3).

Author Biography

Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1937. The fourth of five children, Myers lived a turbulent early life of poverty and family upheaval. His mother died when he was three. Soon after, Myers went to live with his father's former wife, the