She was a victim of childhood rape, a single mother whose great gift was to bring the struggles of the poorest of the American poor, its survivors, into the literary mainstream.Īngelou had grown up among field workers, seeing “fingers cut by the mean little cotton bolls,” she wrote in “Caged Bird.” She was educated in schools that taught her Shakespeare but that denied her and her people the opportunity to live any other life but that of manual labor. Martin Luther King Jr., was a friend to Malcolm X during his African sojourn, acted alongside Broadway thespians like James Earl Jones and was a confidant to novelist James Baldwin.Īngelou was a living link between the rural Deep South of Jim Crow (with its rampant illiteracy, segregation and economic oppression) and the literati who took up the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the cause of the civil rights movement. literary canon, Angelou had transformed herself into the consummate cultural networker, bridging the worlds of art and political activism.

Louis-born daughter of an Arkansas sharecropper family, Angelou had been a streetcar conductor, teen mom, a fry cook, a professional dancer, an actress, a journalist and a playwright (more or less in that order) - all before she turned 40.īy 1969, when she published “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” the autobiography that cemented her place in the U.S. Before she sat down to write her first book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou had already pulled off several stunning acts of personal reinvention.

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