Last reviewed: June 2017
American poet and memoirist
April 4, 1928
St. Louis, Missouri
May 28, 2014
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Maya Angelou was a modern-day Renaissance woman. As a writer, she was best known for her autobiographies, particularly I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and for her collections of poetry, but she also gained prominence through her playwriting, directing, acting, dancing, and involvement in civil rights movements. She was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Upon the breakup of her parents’ marriage, she was sent by her mother to Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her paternal grandmother, Ann Henderson. These years are chronicled in the first volume of Angelou’s autobiography, and they include both typical and atypical experiences of growing up, from the time that Angelou imposed silence upon herself to the time she graduated from Lafayette Training School, aware of the racial prejudice that had prevented her from aspiring to more than an education in a vocational school.
After graduation, Angelou moved to San Francisco to live with her mother. There she gave birth to a son, studied dance and drama, and began a career as a performer. In the 1950s, she performed in nightclubs in San Francisco and New York and toured Europe and Africa as a member of a company staging the opera Porgy and Bess. In the 1960s, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Following this experience, she lived in Ghana, where she was a reporter for the Ghanian Times, a writer for Radio Ghana, an editor of the African Review, and an assistant administrator at the University of Ghana. In 1970, she published the first (and the most famous) of a series of autobiographies. Maya Angelou reciting her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993
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Maya Angelou at York College
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings takes its title from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that includes the lines: “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me / When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore.” The poet Dunbar and the autobiographer Angelou both explore the feeling of entrapment, a caged-in experience particular to black men and women learning to survive. Angelou continued to explore the realities of oppression and survival in the autobiographies written after I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Between 1974 and 1986, she wrote four more memoirs—Gather Together in My Name, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. She also published collections of autobiographical essays, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now and A Song Flung Up to Heaven. She has made hundreds of television appearances and was among the most popular and best-paid speakers on the college lecture circuit. Her stature was such by the 1990s that President Bill Clinton selected her to read “On the Pulse of Morning” at his 1993 inauguration. In 2011, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Angelou’s writings contain a mixture of poetry, prose, and drama. In addition to this mixture of genres, the works demonstrate a combination of comedy and drama, from anecdotes that reveal humorous incidents associated with childhood experiences to passages that suggest the dramatic intensity of growing up black and female in a racist, sexist South. Like the painter who mixes colors to achieve a unique hue, Angelou’s mix results in a particular voice that sings of slavery and survival, of hatred and love, and of darkness and illumination.
Her most significant work, and the one that best demonstrates this unique voice, is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Both popular and academic audiences have identified this autobiography as one of the finest of its kind, a memoir that speaks of the unique experience of Maya Angelou while at the same time offering a universal story of maturation. Her other autobiographies have not been received so enthusiastically and are sometimes criticized for lacking the complexities and depth of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Despite this mixed review of her later works, there is little question that both the quantity and quality of her work, particularly the quality of her first memoir, assured Maya Angelou a place in literary history.