Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of the most important American autobiographies.

Maya Angelou was one of the most celebrated American writers and public voices of the twentieth century — a poet, memoirist, actor, dancer, filmmaker, and civil rights activist whose life story was itself extraordinary. Born in St. Louis in 1928 and raised largely in Stamps, Arkansas, she survived poverty, racism, childhood sexual assault, and years of selective mutism before finding her voice as a writer. That voice, when she found it, was one of the most distinctive in American letters: warm, rhythmic, and precisely controlled, equally effective in prose and poetry.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first of seven autobiographical volumes, recounts her childhood through the age of seventeen with a candour that was radical at the time of publication. The book’s account of her assault by her mother’s boyfriend and its aftermath — including the psychological impact of what happened when she disclosed the assault — is handled with both unflinching honesty and profound literary skill. The portrait of Stamps, of her grandmother, and of the Black community in the Jim Crow South gives the book historical as well as personal depth. It was challenged and banned in various American school districts, which says more about the discomfort of the challengers than about the book’s suitability.

Angelou’s poetry — collected in volumes including Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie and And Still I Rise — is best understood as the work of a spoken-word artist as much as a page poet: it is musical, oratorical, and gains enormously from being read aloud or heard in her voice. Her 1993 inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning” is a useful introduction. Critics have occasionally noted that her later public persona became somewhat reduced to inspirational quotation, but the early memoirs and the best of the poetry represent a genuinely major literary achievement.