An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet.
As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in ‘Southern Women Writers: The New Generation’,Angelou was recognized “as a spokesperson for… all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.”
She served on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary degrees before her death.
Angelou’s most famous work, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ (1969), deals with her early years in Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her brother and paternal grandmother. In one of its most evocative (and controversial) moments, Angelou describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was just seven years old.
When the man was murdered by her uncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking. Angelou remained mute for five years, but developed a love for language. She read Black authors like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.
When Angelou was twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated African American woman, finally got her to speak again. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou recalled in her children’s book ‘Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship’ (1986), emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the nature of and importance of education, and instilled in her a love of poetry. Angelou graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.
First book
‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ is the first of Angelou’s six autobiographies. It is widely taught in schools, though it has faced controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuse and violence. Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre’s relationship with truth and memory.
Though her books are episodic and tightly-crafted, the events seldom follow a strict chronology and are arranged to emphasize themes. Other volumes include ‘Gather Together in My Name’ (1974), which begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother; ‘Singin’ and Swingin and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas’, an account of her tour in Europe and Africa with ‘Porgy and Bess;The Heart of a Woman’ (1981), a description of Angelou’s acting and writing career in New York and her work for the civil rights movement; and ‘ll God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes’ (1986), which recounts Angelou’s travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her son, to America.
It took Angelou fifteen years to write the final volume of her autobiography, ‘A Song Flung up to Heaven’ (2002). The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned from Ghana in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother’s table and began to write ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ in 1968. Angelou hesitated so long to start the book and took so long to finish it, she told ‘Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service’ interviewer Sherryl Connelly, because so many painful things happened to her, and to the entire African-American community, in those four years. “I didn’t know how to write it,” she said. “I didn’t see how the assassination of Malcolm [X], the Watts riot, the breakup of a love affair, then [the assassination of Dr.] Martin [Luther] King [Jr.], how I could get all that loose with something uplifting in it.”
‘A Song Flung up to Heaven’ deals forthrightly with these events, and “the poignant beauty of Angelou’s writing enhances rather than masks the candor with which she addresses the racial crisis through which America was passing,” Wayne A. Holst wrote in ‘Christian Century’.
Widely-read
Angelou was also a prolific and widely-read poet, and her poetry has often been lauded more for its depictions of Black beauty, the strength of women, and the human spirit; criticizing the Vietnam War; demanding social justice for all—than for its poetic virtue. Yet ‘Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie’, which was published in 1971, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. According to Carol Neubauer in ‘Southern Women Writers’, “the first twenty poems describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss.”
In other poems, “Angelou turns her attention to the lives of black people in America from the time of slavery to the rebellious 1960s. Her themes deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic survival.”
As Angelou wrote her autobiographies and poems, she continued her career in film and television. She was the first Black woman to have a screenplay (Georgia, Georgia) produced in 1972. She was honored with a nomination for an Emmy award for her performance in Roots in 1977.
In 2013 she was the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community. She died in 2014 at the age of 86.