SOURCE CITATION
"Maya Angelou." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photo provided by Random House.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Standing before the church congregation, little Marguerite Johnson realized that everyone was looking at her, and that she wasn't a white girl with long blonde hair. As she remembered that she was a girl with dark skin, a gap between her teeth, and kinky dark hair, she struggled to remember the words of the poem she'd memorized for Easter. It was no use. As Marguerite ran towards the door of the church, "a green persimmon, or it could have been a lemon, caught me between the legs and squeezed. I tasted the sour on my tongue and felt it in the back of my mouth. Then . . . the sting was burning down my legs and into my Sunday socks." Marguerite Johnson--the girl who would grow up to become a performer who flaunted her beauty, power and grace on stages all over the world--the girl who would become a writer whose work would inspire thousands and thousands of readers of all races and genders and ages--had wet herself. Yet that was just the beginning of a traumatic childhood, as the girl would recall in her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

As a young black woman growing up in the South, and later, in war-time San Francisco, Johnson (who changed her name to Maya Angelou at the beginning of her stage career) faced racism from whites and poor treatment from most men (she was raped when she was seven years old). She found that, in this position, she had few career options, and little chance of leading a fruitful life; she gave birth out of wedlock at seventeen, experimented with drugs, and worked as a madam and prostitute. Instead of letting forces beyond her control overcome her, Angelou began to forge art from her early experiences and change the world as she'd once known it. She became a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director. She became a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, poet, and screenwriter. She became known, as Annie Gottlieb wrote in the New York Times Book Review, as a person who "writes like a song, and like the truth. The wisdom, rue and humor of her storytelling are borne on a lilting rhythm completely her own."

Angelou also became a civil rights activist--she worked at one time for Dr. Martin Luther King and once staged a protest at the United Nations--as well as an educator. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, "Angelou had become recognized not only as a spokesperson for blacks and women, but also for all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States." How had this woman--who had done some things that many would consider immoral--become a leader with a moral agenda? She did so by writing about herself, by fighting for civil and women's rights, and by providing an amazing example of the human potential to rise above defeat. Angelou explained this herself in an interview with George Plimpton in the Paris Review: "In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats--maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats--but we are much stronger than we appear to be, and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be."

Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and lived her early years in Long Beach, California. As she related in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she was just three years old when her parents divorced. Her father sent Angelou and her four-year-old brother alone by train to the home of his mother in Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, a segregated town, "Momma" (as Angelou and her brother Bailey called their grandmother) took care of the children and ran a lunch business and a store. The children were expected to stay clean and sinless, and to do well in school. Although she followed the example of her independent and strong-willed grandmother, and was a healthy child, Angelou felt ugly and unloved. When her mother, who lived in St. Louis, requested a visit from the children, Angelou was shocked by her mother's paler complexion, and by the red lipstick her grandmother would have thought scandalous. Angelou was almost as overwhelmed by her mother's wildness and determination as she was by her beauty.

Life in St. Louis was different from that in Stamps; Angelou was unprepared for the rushing noises of city life and the Saturday night parties. Then, when she was just seven-and-a-half years old, something terrible happened. In one of the most evocative (and controversial) moments in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou described how she was first lovingly cuddled, and later raped by her mother's boyfriend. When the man was murdered by her uncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and she stopped talking. She and her brother were sent back to Stamps. Angelou remained mute for five years, but she developed a love for language and the spoken word. She also read and memorized books. She read the works of black authors and poets, like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Even though she and Bailey were discouraged from reading the works of white writers at home, Angelou read and fell in love with the works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. When Angelou was twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated black woman, finally got her to speak again. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou recalled in Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the nature of and importance of education, and instilled in her with a love of poetry. Maya graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.

When race relations made Stamps a dangerous place for Angelou and her brother, "Momma" took the children to San Francisco, where Angelou's mother was working as a professional gambler. World War II was raging, and while San Franciscans prepared for air raids that never came, Angelou prepared for the rest of her life by attending George Washington High School and by taking lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. When Angelou, just seventeen, graduated from high school and gave birth to a son, she began to work as well. She worked as the first female and black street car conductor in San Francisco. As she explained in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas, she also "worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic's shop, taking the paint off cars with my hands." For a time, Angelou also managed a couple of prostitutes.

Angelou married a white ex-sailor, Tosh Angelos, in 1950. The pair did not have much in common, and Angelou began to take note of the reaction of people--especially African Americans--to their union. After they separated, Angelou continued her study of dance in New York City. She returned to San Francisco and sang in the Purple Onion cabaret. There, Angelou (who had changed her name to fit Bailey's nickname for her, "My," "Mya," and finally "Maya," combined with her ex-husband's last name) garnered the attention of talent scouts. From 1954 to 1955, she was a member of the cast of Porgy and Bess; she visited twenty-two countries before leaving the tour to return to her son. During the late 1950s, Angelou sang in West Coast and Hawaiian nightclubs. After some time living in a houseboat commune in Sausalito, California, she returned to New York.

In New York, Angelou continued her stage career with an appearance in an Off-Broadway show, Calypso Heatwave. Then, with the encouragement of writer John Killens, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and met James Baldwin and other important writers. It was during this time that Angelou had the opportunity to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak. Inspired by his message, she determined to become a part of the struggle for civil rights. So, with comedian Godfrey Cambridge, she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Cabaret for Freedom in 1960, a benefit for Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Given the organizational abilities she demonstrated as she worked for the benefit, she was offered a position as the northern coordinator for Dr. King's SCLC in 1961. That same year, she appeared in Jean Genet's play, The Blacks, which won an Obie Award.

Angelou returned to the United States in the mid-1960s and found a position as a lecturer at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1966. She also played a part in the play Medea in Hollywood. In this period, she was encouraged by author James Baldwin and Random House publishers to write an autobiography. Initially, Angelou declined offers, and went to California for the production of a series of ten one-hour programs that she'd written, "Black, Blues, Black," which were broadcast in 1968. Fortunately, however, Angelou changed her mind and wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The book, which chronicles Angelou's childhood and ends with the birth of her son Guy, bears what Selwyn R. Cudjoe in Black Women Writers calls a burden: "to demonstrate the manner in which the Black female is violated . . . in her tender years and to demonstrate the 'unnecessary insult' of Southern girlhood in her movement to adolescence." Caged Bird won immediate success and a nomination for a National Book Award.

Although Angelou did not write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with the intention of writing other autobiographies, she eventually wrote four more, which may be read with Caged Bird as a series. Most critics have judged the subsequent autobiographies in light of the first, and Caged Bird remains the most highly praised. Gather Together in My Name begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother; it describes a destructive love affair, Angelou's work as a prostitute, her rejection of drug addiction, and the kidnapping of her son. Gather Together was not as well received by critics as Caged Bird. As Mary Jane Lupton reported in Black American Literature Forum, in this 1974 autobiography, "the tight structure" of Caged Bird "appeared to crumble; childhood experiences were replaced by episodes which a number of critics consider disjointed or bizarre." Lupton asserted, however, that there is an important reason why Angelou's later works are not as tight as the first, and why they consist of episodes: these "so-called 'fragments' are reflections of the kind of chaos found in actual living. In altering the narrative structure, Angelou shifts the emphasis from herself as an isolated consciousness to herself as a Black woman participating in diverse experiences among a diverse class of peoples."

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas is Angelou's account of her tour in Europe and Africa with Porgy and Bess. Much of the work concerns Angelou's separation from her son during that time. In The Heart of a Woman, Angelou described her acting and writing career in New York and her work for the civil rights movement. She recalled visits with great activists Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and the legendary singer Billie Holiday. She also told of her move to Africa, and her experiences when her son was injured in a serious car accident; the book ends with Guy's move into a college dormitory at the University of Ghana. "Angelou's message is one blending chorus: Black people and Black women do not just endure, they triumph with a will of collective consciousness that Western experience cannot extinguish," wrote Sondra O'Neale in Black Women Writers. All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes once again explores Guy's accident; it moves on from there to recount Angelou's travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her son, to America.

Angelou's poetry is often lauded more for its content (praising black beauty and the strength of women, lauding 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. This volume contains thirty-eight poems, some of which were published in The Poetry of Maya Angelou. 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 the 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." In Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, dedicated to her husband at the time, Paul Du Feu, Angelou discussed the plight of the human race, the American potential, and the problems plaguing American Blacks. While Sandra M. Gilbert noted in Poetry that Angelou is a "stunningly talented prose writer," she commented that this collection is so "painfully untalented . . . that I can't think of any reason, other than the Maya Myth, for it to be in print."

As Angelou wrote her autobiographies and poems, she continued her career in film and television. She was the first black woman to get 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 1979, Angelou helped adapt her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for a television movie of the same name.

In the early 1990s, when Angelou was in her sixties, she returned to live in the American South, in what Catherine S. Manegold in the New York Times described as a "trim brick house in Winston-Salem." Manegold described Angelou as a woman with broad features, "like chunks of clay collected roughly on a frame," with "dancer's feet," a voice with "a swoop, a lingering vowel, an octave dropped for emphasis," and "the innate and compelling grace of a woman who has constructed a full life, one lived without concession or false excuse." Although Angelou suffers from arthritis, she leads a very busy life. She teaches literature at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem and is "in great demand on the lecture circuit, making about 80 appearances a year."

Angelou was especially productive in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to Neubauer, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Angelou's fifth autobiography (published in 1986), "swept Angelou to new heights of critical and popular acclaim." Angelou wrote the poetry for the film, Poetic Justice (1993) and played the role of Aunt June. She also played Lelia Mae in the 1993 television film, There Are No Children Here, and appeared as Anna in the feature film How to Make an American Quilt in 1995. Also in 1995, Angelou's poetry helped commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations. She had elevated herself to what Richard Grenier in National Review called a "dizzying height of achievement." As a title from an article by Freda Garmaise in Gentleman's Quarterly proclaimed, "Maya-ness" was "next to godliness."

One of the most important sources of Angelou's fame in the early 1990s was President Bill Clinton's invitation to write and read the first inaugural poem in decades. Americans all across the country watched the six-foot-tall, elegantly dressed woman as she read her poem for the new president on January 20, 1993. "On the Pulse of Morning," which begins "A Rock, a River, a Tree," calls for peace, racial and religious harmony, and social justice for people of different origins, incomes, genders, and sexual orientations. It recalls the civil rights movement, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech as it urges America to "Give birth again/To the Dream" of equality. Angelou challenged the new administration and all Americans to work together for progress: "Here, on the pulse of this new day,/You may have the grace to look up and out/And into your sister's eyes, and into/Your brother's face, your country/And say simply/Very simply/With hope--Good morning."

While some viewed President Clinton's selection of Angelou as a tribute to the poet and her lifelong contribution to civil rights and the arts, Angelou had her own ideas. She told Catherine S. Manegold in an interview: "In all my work, what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike." She added, "It may be that Mr. Clinton asked me to write the inaugural poem because he understood that I am the kind of person who really does bring people together."

During the early 1990s, Angelou contributed more poetry and work for children than autobiographical work. Now Sheba Sings the Song is just one poem inspired by the work of artist Tom Feelings; the lines or phrases are isolated on each page with eighty-four of Tom Feelings' sepia-toned and black-and-white drawings of black women. I Shall Not Be Moved is a collection that takes its title from a line in one of the book's poems. Phenomenal Woman, a collection of four poems, takes its title from a poem which originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1978; the narrator of the poem describes the physical and spiritual characteristics and qualities that make her attractive.

Angelou dedicated Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, a collection of twenty-four short essays, to Oprah Winfrey, the television talk-show host who celebrated Angelou's sixty-fifth birthday with a grand party. The essays in this book contain declarations, complaints, memories, opinions, and advice on subjects ranging from faith to jealousy. Genevieve Stuttaford, writing in Publishers Weekly, described the essays as "quietly inspirational pieces." Anne Whitehouse of the New York Times Book Review observed that the book would "appeal to readers in search of clear messages with easily digested meanings." Yet not all critics appreciated this collection. Richard Grenier of the National Review concluded that the book "is of a remarkably coherent tone, being from first page to last of a truly awesome emptiness."

Although Angelou's autobiographies are written, in part, for young people, they are beyond the comprehension of most young children. With the publication of Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, children can access the world Angelou describes in Caged Bird. Like Now Sheba Sings the Song, the text of Life Doesn't Frighten Me consists of one poem. Each line or phrase is accompanied by the dynamic, abstract and colorful paintings of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me, with photographs by Margaret Courtney-Clarke, a young African girl introduces herself and discusses her life. She tells about her friend, a pet chicken to whom she tells all of her best secrets. She displays her beautiful home, and explains how her mother has carefully painted it. The girl also explains how, although she must go to school wearing uniforms her father has purchased in town, she loves to wear her traditional beads and clothing. She expresses a wish that she and the reader can be friends despite the physical and cultural distance that separates them.

Kofi and His Magic is a picture book which allows young readers to get to know an African child, another culture, and another worldview. Through Angelou's text and Courtney-Clarke's colorful photographs, a West African boy named Kofi shows off his beautiful earth-toned home and tells of his life. Kofi's town, Bonwire, is famous for its Kente cloth production. He explains how, even though he is still quite young, he is a trained weaver of Kente cloth. Then, Kofi takes readers on a journey to visit other nearby towns and people, and finally, to see the ocean (which he initially thinks is a big lake). At the end of the book, after Kofi returns to Bonwire, he reveals why he calls himself a magician--Kofi's magic involves allowing the reader to imagine that she or he can visit Kofi and become his friend--the reader must only close her eyes and open her mind for the magic to work.

As Angelou has been busy furthering her career, critics and scholars have attempted to keep up with her, and to interpret her continuing work. While many critics have pointed out that the message in Angelou's prose is universal, Mary Jane Lupton has called attention to the theme of motherhood in Angelou's work. In five volumes of autobiography, Angelou "moves forward: from being a child, to being a mother; to leaving the child; to having the child, in the fifth volume, achieve his independence." In her interview with George Plimpton in the Paris Review, Angelou agreed with him that the love of her child was a "prevailing theme" in her autobiographical work.

Some critics have argued that Angelou's poetry is inferior to her prose. Unlike her autobiographical work, Angelou's poetry has not received much of what William Sylvester of Contemporary Poets would call "serious critical attention." In Sylvester's opinion, however, Angelou's poetry is "sassy." When "we hear her poetry, we listen to ourselves." In addition, as Lynn Z. Bloom pointed out in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Angelou's poetry becomes far more interesting when she dramatizes it in her characteristically dynamic stage performances." Colorfully dressed, Angelou usually recites her poems before spellbound, if crowded, audiences.

Angelou takes her writing very seriously. She told Plimpton, "Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass--the slave narrative--speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning "we." And what a responsibility. Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented that Angelou "casts a keen eye inward and bares her soul in a slim volume of personal essays" titled Even the Stars Look Lonesome. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, described the collection as "20 brief, anecdotal, and spicily provocative essays."

While many critics have described Angelou's ability to write beautiful prose as a natural talent, Angelou has emphasized that she must work very hard to write the way she does. As she has explained to Plimpton and others, very early each morning she goes to a sparse hotel room to concentrate, to lie on the bed and write. She spends the morning on first draft work, and goes home in the afternoon to shower, cook a beautiful meal, and share it with friends. Later that night, she looks at what she's written, and begins to cut words and make revisions. Critics who suggest writing is easy for her, Angelou explained to Plimpton, "are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it (a book) to sing. I work at the language."

UPDATES
December 7, 2005: Angelou's poem "Amazing Peace," written especially for the 2005 White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony, was published in a stand-alone edition by Random House. Source: Yahoo News, http://news.yahoo.com, December 7, 2005.

April 11, 2006: Angelou's book Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me was published by Random House. Source: Amazon, www.amazon.com, April 26, 2006.

September 12, 2006: Angelou announced that she will be hosting a weekly hour-long radio program on XM Satellite Radio's Oprah & Friends channel. Source: USA Today, www.usatoday.com, September 13, 2006.

October 19, 2006: Angelou won the 2006 Quill Award for poetry for Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem. Source: The Quill Awards, www.thequills.org, October 19, 2006.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Surname is pronounced "Ahn-ge-low"; born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, MO; daughter of Bailey (a doorman and naval dietician) and Vivian (a registered nurse, professional gambler, and a rooming house and bar owner; maiden name, Baxter) Johnson; married Tosh Angelos, 1950 (divorced); married Paul Du Feu, December, 1973 (divorced, 1981); children: Guy. Education: Attended public schools in Arkansas and California; studied music privately, dance with Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Ann Halprin, and drama with Frank Silvera and Gene Frankel; studied cinematography in Sweden. Memberships: American Film Institute (member of board of Trustees, 1975--, Directors Guild of America, Equity, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Women's Prison Association (member of advisory board), National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, Harlem Writer's Guild, Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, W. E. B. DuBois Foundation, National Society of Collegiate Scholars, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Addresses: Home--Winston-Salem, NC. Office--c/o Dave La Camera, Lordly and Dame, Inc., 51 Church Street, Boston, MA 02116.

CAREER
Author, poet, scriptwriter, playwright, performer, actress, and composer. Arab Observer (English-language newsweekly), Cairo, Egypt, associate editor, 1961-62; University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies, Legon-Accra, Ghana, assistant administrator of School of Music and Drama, 1963-66; freelance writer for Ghanaian Times and Ghanaian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963-65; African Review, Accra, feature editor, 1964-66. Lecturer at University of California, Los Angeles, 1966; writer-in-residence at University of Kansas, 1970; distinguished visiting professor at Wake Forest University, Wichita State University, and California State University, Sacramento, 1974; Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, 1981--; visiting professor, universities in the United States; lecturer at various locations in the United States. Southern Christian Leadership Conference, northern coordinator, 1959-60; appointed member of American Revolution Bicentennial Council by President Gerald R. Ford, 1975-76; member of the Presidential Commission for International Women's Year, 1978-79; Board of Governors, University of North Carolina, Maya Angelou Institute for the Improvement of Child & Family Education at Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC, 1998. Appeared in Porgy and Bess on twenty-two nation tour sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, 1954-55; appeared in Off-Broadway plays, Calypso Heatwave, 1957, and Jean Genet's The Blacks, 1960; produced and performed in Cabaret for Freedom, Off-Broadway, 1960; appeared in Mother Courage at University of Ghana, 1964; appeared in Medea in Hollywood, 1966; television narrator, interviewer, and host for African American specials and theater series, 1972--; made Broadway debut in Look Away, 1973; directed film, All Day Long, 1974; appeared in television miniseries Roots, 1977; directed play, And Still I Rise, Oakland, CA, 1976; directed play, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, London, 1988; appeared as Aunt June in film, Poetic Justice, 1993; appeared as Lelia Mae in television film, There Are No Children Here, 1993; appeared in advertising for the United Negro College Fund, 1994; appeared as Anna in film, How to Make an American Quilt, 1995; appeared in the film Down in the Delta, 1998; appeared in film The Amen Corner and television series Down in the Delta, both 1999.