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Maya Angelou

1928–2014 · 86 years Tier II

She stopped speaking at eight and started again at 13

Portrait of Maya Angelou — Clinton Library — 1993-01-20 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

She was three when her parents' marriage ended and her father put her and her brother on a train to Stamps, Arkansas, to a grandmother who ran a general store and somehow made money out of the Depression. Bailey Jr. gave her the name Maya. At eight, back with her mother in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. She said his name in court. He served one day, and four days after his release he was murdered, probably by her uncles. She concluded that her voice had killed a man and stopped using it for almost five years. A teacher named Bertha Flowers got it back by refusing to believe she loved poetry until she would speak it aloud.

At 16 she became the first Black woman to conduct a San Francisco streetcar. At 17 she had a son. Then two decades of everything else: modern dance, calypso at the Purple Onion under the stage name she kept for life, a European tour with Porgy and Bess, Northern Coordinator of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, associate editor of an English-language weekly in Cairo, an administrator at the University of Ghana, and a return to New York in 1965 to help Malcolm X build a new organization weeks before he was shot. In 1968, after a dinner with James Baldwin and the Feiffers and a dare from the Random House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Six more autobiographies followed, and a Pulitzer nomination in 1971 for her poems.

To write the rape she put herself back inside it. Her working method was a hotel room, yellow legal pads and a deck of cards, played until she could reach the state she described as reliving the agony and the anguish. The results have never sat quietly in one genre. She used dialogue, plot and characterization the way a novelist does, acknowledged the fictional elements herself, and scholars have argued ever since whether the seven volumes are autobiography or autobiographical fiction. The book meanwhile became one of the most challenged in American schools, third on the American Library Association's list for 1990 to 2000 and sixth for the decade after, objected to for sex, violence, language and irreverence about religion.

The reputation split in two and has stayed split. The public one kept climbing: the inaugural poem in 1993, the first by anyone since Robert Frost in 1961, a Grammy for the recording, the National Medal of Arts in 2000, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, more than 50 honorary degrees, and in January 2022 the first Black woman on an American quarter. The critical one did not. Harold Bloom called her verse popular poetry that makes no formal or cognitive demands on a reader, and placed her among inspirational writers. Zofia Burr answered that the critics were measuring the wrong thing, since Angelou wrote to be representative rather than confessional. She died at Winston-Salem on May 28, 2014.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Maya Angelou's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings book
The first of seven autobiographies, and among the most challenged books in American schools 1969
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie book
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize 1971
Georgia, Georgia film
The first produced screenplay by a Black woman. She wrote the soundtrack too. 1972
On the Pulse of Morning speech
Recited at Bill Clinton's inauguration. The recording won a Grammy. 1993
Down in the Delta film
She directed it, having set out to direct a feature for years 1996
Mom & Me & Mom book
The last of the seven, about her mother Vivian Baxter 2013

Life in brief

with age at each point

April 4, 1928 aged 0 Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis
1936 aged ~8 Raped at eight, and stops speaking for almost five years Her attacker was jailed one day and murdered four days after his release.
1944 aged ~16 Becomes the first Black woman to conduct a San Francisco streetcar She was 16 and had wanted the uniform.
1954 aged ~26 Tours Europe with Porgy and Bess
1962 aged ~34 Moves to Accra and stays three years She became an administrator at the University of Ghana and a friend of Malcolm X.
April 4, 1968 aged 40 Martin Luther King Jr. is killed on her 40th birthday He had just asked her to organize a march. She stopped celebrating the day.
1969 aged ~41 Publishes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
1981 aged ~53 Takes a lifetime professorship at Wake Forest without a bachelor's degree From then on she called herself a teacher who writes.
January 20, 1993 aged 64 Recites On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's inauguration The first inaugural poem since Robert Frost in 1961.