Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014) was an American poet, memoirist, performer and civil rights activist. [1] Her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), became a landmark of American letters and the first of seven volumes tracing her life. She recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the 1993 presidential inauguration, won three Grammy Awards for spoken-word recordings, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. [2]
Early life
Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on 4 April 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. [1] After her parents separated she and her brother Bailey, who gave her the name Maya, were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to be raised by their paternal grandmother, who kept a general store. The segregated rural South of her childhood provides much of the material of her first autobiography.
At the age of eight, during a stay with her mother in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. The man was killed shortly after the trial, and Angelou, believing her testimony had caused his death, stopped speaking for several years. During this silence she read widely, an experience she credited with forming her as a writer. [3] The family later moved to California, where she attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and studied dance and drama at the California Labor School. She became the city's first Black female cable car conductor and gave birth to her son Guy at seventeen.
Performance and activism
Angelou worked through the 1950s as a dancer, singer and actress, touring Europe and Africa with a production of Porgy and Bess and recording an album of calypso material. She later joined the Harlem Writers Guild in New York.
In 1960 she became northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Martin Luther King Jr. [2] She then lived in Cairo, editing the English-language Arab Observer, and in Accra, where she worked at the University of Ghana and came to know Malcolm X. She returned to the United States in 1965 to help him build the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a plan ended by his assassination.
Writing
Encouraged by James Baldwin and an editor at Random House, Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969. Its account of a Black girlhood in the segregated South, told with literary technique usually reserved for fiction, was nominated for a National Book Award and has remained continuously in print, though also frequently challenged in American school libraries. [3]
Six further autobiographies followed, including Gather Together in My Name and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. Her poetry collections include Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and And Still I Rise, whose title poem became one of her most recited works. [4] She also wrote screenplays, plays and essays, and directed the feature film Down in the Delta in 1998.
Later years and honours
From 1982 Angelou held a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In January 1993 she read "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to do so since Robert Frost in 1961; the recording won her a Grammy Award. [1]
She received the Spingarn Medal, the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and more than fifty honorary degrees. She died at her home in Winston-Salem on 28 May 2014.
Legacy
Angelou is credited with expanding the possibilities of autobiography as a literary form and with giving wide readership to the experience of Black American women. [2] In 2022 she became the first Black woman depicted on a United States quarter.
