Maya Angelou: Life, Works, and Literary Legacy

Introduction

This paper introduces and discusses author Maya Angelou and some of her most important works. Specifically, it examines why her work is important and provides a brief biography of the writer. Maya Angelou has been an inspiration to writers, women, and Black Americans ever since she began writing. Her career has spanned decades and shows no signs of slowing down. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, Maya Angelou and her works are national treasures, meant to be enjoyed, contemplated, and to inspire readers for generations to come.

Biography of Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. Her given name was Marguerite Annie Johnson. Her brother Bailey gave her the nickname "Maya," derived from the words "my" and "my sister."

Maya's mother, Vivian Baxter, was a nurse and card dealer; her father, Bailey Johnson Sr., was a doorman and also a dietician and meal adviser for the Navy. They had a difficult marriage that ended in divorce, and neither parent was able to care for their young children in the aftermath. When Maya was three and her brother Bailey four, their father put the children on a train from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas — home of Bailey Sr.'s mother, Annie Henderson, owner and operator of a general store (Lupton 4).

When she was eight years old, her mother's boyfriend raped her, an experience that affected her profoundly. For several years afterward, she simply did not speak. She eventually moved to California and graduated from high school in San Francisco, where she also grew close to her mother, whom she had not seen since going to live with her grandmother in Arkansas.

Her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was published in 1970, when Angelou was 41. In 1971, she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Before beginning her writing career, she worked as an actress, dancer, and singer, having performed in a touring production of Porgy and Bess, Jean Genet's play The Blacks, and the acclaimed television series Roots. At sixteen, she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.

She began writing formally in the 1960s, but she knew she had the gift from an early age. In one interview, she reflected on this:

"I knew I could write by the time I was 20. I could write. I had spent six years as a mute, and so I had read everything. And I had memorized. I memorized 60 sonnets. And I memorized Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen… and Edgar Allan Poe. I loved Poe so much I called him 'Eap' to myself" (Weaver L1).

Her first published piece was a play performed in Los Angeles called "The Least of These." She also worked as a director for stage and film. At the time of this writing, she lived in North Carolina and wrote every day in a hotel room she kept year-round as an office. She was also a professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Her Autobiographical Works

Maya Angelou's body of work is varied and extensive. She wrote six autobiographical works, numerous poems and essays, and even children's books. "Although all of these volumes are distinct in style and narration, they are unified through a number of repeated themes and through the developing character of the narrator" (Lupton 1).

Her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), tells the story of her early life, beginning when she was sent to live with her grandmother in Arkansas at just three years old. This first volume recounts the rape she suffered at age eight and how deeply it scarred her. She is the "caged bird" of the title, and she frames that cage as one that holds all Black Americans hostage. The book ends with Maya giving birth to her son and sets the foundation for the rest of her autobiographical series.

The second book, Gather Together in My Name, begins in San Francisco, where Maya is living with her mother after giving birth. It is an often dark account of her coming of age. Trying to care for her son, Angelou takes on a variety of roles — from mother to prostitute. "She also exposes herself to a number of risky relationships with men: a dancer; a married man who sells stolen clothes; a vein-scarred drug user" (Lupton 76). Angelou matures over the course of this book, slowly becoming the woman who will develop into such a gifted writer. At the book's end, a trusted friend shows her a heroin den, confronting her with the drug's devastating toll. Frightened enough to change, Angelou renounces her destructive lifestyle and returns to her mother to rebuild her life.

By the third book, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Angelou has given up her former ways but still struggles with self-confidence. She feels ugly and "out of tune" with her life and her surroundings. She meets and marries her first husband in this volume, and divorces him by its end. Each book in the series serves as a stepping-stone through her life, and this one is no exception. As she learns more about herself, she becomes more fully a woman and more at ease with who she is. The book also marks an important milestone in literary history: "'Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas' marks an historical moment in the history of African-American autobiography. At this time, no other well-known Black female autobiographer had taken her story into a third volume" (Lupton 98).

By the time her fourth book appeared, readers across America and the world had grown familiar with this young Black woman navigating life on her own terms. The Heart of a Woman covers the pivotal late 1950s and early 1960s, when race had become a national and deeply volatile issue. In this volume, Angelou begins working with Martin Luther King Jr. and takes her first serious steps as a writer. She moves to New York City and works extensively with King as a fund-raiser. She also meets her second husband and moves to Egypt with him, only to discover his infidelity. She leaves for Liberia, hoping at last to find freedom. On the way, her son Guy is injured in a car accident in Ghana, and that is where the volume ends. This is her most political book, offering readers a clear window into her beliefs and what drove her to leave the United States. As she writes: "I disagreed. Black people could never be like whites. We were different. More respectful, more merciful, more spiritual" (Angelou 172).

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes tells the story of her four years in Ghana. While it continues Angelou's own narrative, it also follows Guy closely — his recovery from the car accident, his studies at the University of Ghana, and his growth into an independent adult. This volume illustrates the great love Angelou held for her son while continuing to trace her own development as a woman and a writer.

Angelou's autobiographies draw their shape from personal and cultural reference points rather than from the demands of plot, as in a mystery novel or a spy thriller. Whereas a novel is a narrative that must reach a conclusion, an autobiography is an unfinished narrative told in the first person by the adult who recollects it years later. As critic Mary Lupton observes, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes cannot truly conclude the series "because there are potentially more autobiographies to be written, from images and actions that remain in the repository of memories that connect her to the people around her" (Lupton 142).

Lupton proved correct. Another book followed Traveling Shoes in 2002, completing the look back at what made Angelou who she became. The final volume ends in 1968, after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — events that shook Angelou to her core. It closes as she begins writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, bringing her story full circle.

Conclusion

At age 74, Angelou remained an active writer, speaker, and advocate for people everywhere. She recently performed a piece with the Boston Pops Orchestra on Cape Cod. Even before she began, the audience was transfixed by the power of a woman who wields language with the love and discipline that a wise mother affords her children. She opened with a humorous reminiscence of her grandmother, who grew passionate with song — a moment that captured, in miniature, the warmth, humor, and depth that have defined her work across a lifetime.