[4] His mother is British,[5] and his father was a U.S. Army officer from Pennsylvania who served in South Korea as a military chaplain,[6][7][8] often helping out local orphans.

[11] Myers spent his childhood in Bermuda and his high school youth in apartheid-era South Africa,[12][13][14] and received graduate education in West Berlin during the early 1980s,[15][4][16] occasionally visiting East Germany.

[20] Myers’ opinion columns for the Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal generally focus on North Korea, which he says is not a Marxist-Leninist or a Stalinist state, but a "national-socialist country.

[27] Myers' Han Sŏrya and the North Korean literature: The Failure of Socialist Realism in the DPRK (1994) was adapted from his 1992 dissertation at the University of Tübingen and published as the sixty-ninth volume of the Cornell East Asia Series.

[28] A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose (2002) was developed from his critical review essay of the same name published in the Atlantic in 2001.

"[30] Myers asserts that the North Korean political system is not based on communism or Stalinism, and he contends that the official Juche idea is a sham ideology for foreign consumption and intended to establish Kim Il Sung's credentials as a thinker alongside Mao Zedong.

According to his own account, promoting him to write the book was the realization he was making "not the slightest bit of headway" with The Cleanest Race in challenging the conventional wisdom about Juche in the academia.

[36] Felix Abt, a Swiss business affairs specialist who lived in North Korea for seven years, describes Myers' claims in The Cleanest Race as "flawed" and "shaky".

[38]Tatiana Gabroussenko points out that Myers is the only Western academic who thinks that North Korean literature does not have the hallmarks of socialist realism.

[43] Scholar Pak Noja, also known as Vladimir Tikhonov, a Soviet-born Korean activist and historian, criticized Myers, commenting that had the academic rigor of overseas Koreanology had been a little bit higher, his work would have clearly been established as a non-academic, somewhat amateurish historical revisionist attempt like The Comfort Women of the Empire.

[51] Myers had an interview in 2024 with the ultraconservative Segye Ilbo, supported by the Unification Church; he opposed the Impeachment of Park Geun-hye and defended pro-Park conservatives.