Award-Winning Novelist Has Fond Memories of Manchester Childhood

Novelist John Dalton’s old stomping grounds are barely recognizable these days. He grew up in what was at the time unincorporated St. Louis County, but the area has since been annexed into Manchester, and the three acres his family owned have transformed into subdivisions. But the drastic changes haven’t dulled Dalton’s fond memories of the area.

“Everybody had a lot of room to run around, and all around us was open woods,” he said, speaking of the area that is now Carmen Oaks Court off of Carmen Road in Manchester.

“You know, I grew up in the mid-'70s, when your parents would just say ‘be home for dinner at five o’clock’ and otherwise you just got to roam, and we would just roam everywhere," he said. "I just spent a lot of time walking in the woods of unincorporated West County, Manchester, Valley Park, that area. That might have been a little risky or dangerous, but it was cool when you were a 10-year-old boy.”

Dalton said he didn’t grow up in a house full of books and didn’t get into reading until one day in seventh grade when he was walking home from St. Joseph’s Catholic School.

“I passed a bookmobile parked in the parking lot of a church, so I went inside and started looking at books and started reading science fiction,” Dalton said. “And I read science fiction for the next five or six years.”

Although he was an avid reader throughout high school, Dalton was anything but a model student. 

“I was a bad student,” Dalton said. “I was totally an underachiever. It was so bad that by my senior year they put me in this program called Cooperative Opportunity Education, what it meant was I had a full-time job at where I scrubbed pots in the kitchen and put together trays of food for the patients...but I would show up (at ) for two hours every day and study these old manuals from the '50s that said stuff like ‘This is a soup ladle. This is a spoon.’ So I’d study that and then go off to scrub dishes and make trays of food all day long.”

Then one day he was called into his counselor's office at Parkway.

The counselor told him that a new law, championed by the Reagan administration, was going cut Social Security payments to the children of deceased recipients. The money Dalton's family received from his deceased father’s Social Security was going to decrease significantly unless John became a full-time college student. In that case, his family’s benefits would remain the same.

So, that very day, John enrolled in 12 hours at St. Louis Community College at Meremac. He later received his high school diploma via correspondence courses while already a full-time college student. Moments after enrolling at the community college, he found out that his first class, a psychology course, started in 30 minutes. 

“It was a startling day that changed my life. I came home around 8 o’clock, and my mom was like ‘Hi, son how was your day?’ and I said ‘Well Mom, you’re not going to believe this but I’m in college.’”

Something about college clicked with Dalton. By the time he left Meramec for the University of Missouri, St. Louis he was a straight-A student. 

After graduating from the university, he traveled extensively and lived in Taiwan for several years, where he met his wife. He also lived in Cape Cod as well as Chapel Hill, NC and Iowa City, IA where he earned his master's of fine arts from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. His first novel Heaven Lake was influenced heavily by his time abroad and won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Dalton has since returned to St. Louis and now heads the master of fine arts in creative writing program at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

His new novel, The Inverted Forest, has gotten solid reviews in notable places such as the Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly. He currently resides with his wife and two children in Olivette.

Even though Dalton’s boyhood home no longer exists, he still has reason to drive by the area of Manchester where it used to be. His mother and sister were the last family in the area to sell to developers, and they only did so with the stipulation that street that would run through the future subdivision be named after their family.

“Whenever I’m back in the area I go and check out Dalton Terrace,” Dalton said.