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Maya Angelou, pseudônimo de Marguerite Ann Johnson (St. Louis, Missouri, 4 de abril de 1928 — Winston-Salem, Carolina do Norte, 28 de maio de 2014), foi uma escritora, poetisa e ativista dos Estados Unidos.
Maya Angelou (/ ˈ æ n dʒ ə l oʊ / ⓘ AN-jə-loh; born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows ...
- Background
- Plot Summary
- Style and Genre
- Form
- Themes
- Reception and Legacy
- Sources Cited
Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor J...
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen and the struggles she faces—particularly with racism and self-affirmation—in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother (M...
Angelou's prose works, while presenting a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form, can be placed in the long tradition of African-American autobiography. Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development, however, often lead reviewers to categorize her books, including I Know Why the Caged...
When Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature, according to critic Pierre A. Walker, was thematic unity. One of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion, in order to achieve her political purposes, which were to demonstrate how to resist...
Identity
In the course of Caged Bird, Maya, who has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America", goes from being a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-aware individual who responds to racism with dignity and a strong sense of her own identity. Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the "formation of female cultural identity" is woven into the book's narrative, setting Maya up as "a role model for Black women". Scholar Liliane Arensberg call...
Racism
Joanne M. Braxton calls Caged Bird "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era". Pierre A. Walker expresses a similar sentiment, and places it in the African American literature tradition of political protest. Stamps, Arkansas, as depicted in Caged Bird, has very little "social ambiguity"; it is a racist world divided between Black and white, male and female. Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the Bla...
Rape
Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text. Opal Moore calls Angelou's graphic and complicated depiction of rape and incest "the center and bottom" of the autobiography and states the rape must be understood within the context of the entire book; everything that happens to Maya in it "should be understood against the ravaging of rape". For Moore, the rape "raises issues of trust, truth, and lie, lo...
Critical reception and sales
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. The other volumes in her series of seven autobiographies are judged and compared to Caged Bird. It became a bestseller immediately after it was published. Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book "liberates the reader into life" and called it "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death". According to Angelou's biographers, "Readers, especially women, and in particular Bla...
Influence
When Caged Bird was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African-American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, Black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Julian Mayfield, who calls Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", has insisted that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for African American autobiography as a whol...
Censorship
Caged Bird has been criticized by many parents, causing it to be removed from school curricula and library shelves. The book was approved to be taught in public schools and was placed in public school libraries through the U.S. in the early-1980s, and was included in Advanced Placement and gifted student curriculum. Attempts by parents to censor it began in 1983. Some have been critical of its sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions. Many parents through...
Angelou, Maya (1969). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-50789-2.Arensberg, Liliane K. (1999). "Death as Metaphor for Self". In Braxton, Joanne M. (ed.). Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook. Oxford Press. pp. 111–128. ISBN 0-19-511606-2.Baisnée, Valérie (1994). Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-0109-7.4 de mai. de 1999 · Maya Angelou (born April 4, 1928, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died May 28, 2014, Winston-Salem, North Carolina) was an American poet, memoirist, and actress whose several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and actress whose several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual...
- Maya Angelou’s first autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), gained critical acclaim and a National Book Award nomination. H...
- In addition to writing, Maya Angelou was a dancer who studied with Martha Graham and Pearl Primus. She acted onstage, in films, and on television i...
- Maya Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts (2000) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010). She won three Grammy Awards for her spoken...
Maya Angelou, reciting her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton. Maya Angelou, an African-American writer who is best known for her seven autobiographies, was also a prolific and successful poet.
Learn about the life and achievements of Maya Angelou, a celebrated poet, memoirist, educator, activist and more. Explore her 36 books, including the bestseller I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and her legacy.
Poet, dancer, singer, activist, and scholar Maya Angelou was a world-famous author. She was best known for her unique and pioneering autobiographical writing style. On April 4, 1928, Marguerite Ann Johnson, known to the world as Maya Angelou, was born in St. Louis, Missouri.
