Maya Angelou overcame a difficult and traumatic childhood to become a prize-winning poet and the author of several best-selling autobiographies, including her celebrated first volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). She was also the first African American, and the first woman, invited to read a poem at the inauguration of a president of the United States.
Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, Maya was three when her parents were divorced. She and her four-year-old brother Bailey were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, "Momma" Anderson, who ran a grocery store in Stamps, Arkansas, where the rural black population suffered from poverty and racial oppression. Momma Anderson, a "wise, tall tree of a woman," taught her granddaughter the importance of religion, family, hard work, and standing up to bigotry. Without courage, Maya learned as a child, life's other virtues are meaningless.
Johnson would need all the courage she could muster to deal with a tragic event that occurred when she was seven-and-a-half years old. While visiting her mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson, in St. Louis, she was brutally raped by Vivian's boyfriend. Confused, terrified, and guilt-ridden, she retreated into silence, refusing to speak to anyone, except her brother, for five years.
When Johnson did speak again, having returned with …show more content…
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first in a series of several autobiographical volumes, was published and nominated for a National Book Award in 1970. It became an instant success. "I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember," her story begins, and goes on to poignantly chronicle her childhood experiences, ending with Guy's birth. "Her portrait is a biblical study of life in the midst of death," Baldwin said about the highly praised book, which Angelou later adapted into a film
Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, Maya was three when her parents were divorced. She and her four-year-old brother Bailey were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, "Momma" Anderson, who ran a grocery store in Stamps, Arkansas, where the rural black population suffered from poverty and racial oppression. Momma Anderson, a "wise, tall tree of a woman," taught her granddaughter the importance of religion, family, hard work, and standing up to bigotry. Without courage, Maya learned as a child, life's other virtues are meaningless.
Johnson would need all the courage she could muster to deal with a tragic event that occurred when she was seven-and-a-half years old. While visiting her mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson, in St. Louis, she was brutally raped by Vivian's boyfriend. Confused, terrified, and guilt-ridden, she retreated into silence, refusing to speak to anyone, except her brother, for five years.
When Johnson did speak again, having returned with …show more content…
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first in a series of several autobiographical volumes, was published and nominated for a National Book Award in 1970. It became an instant success. "I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember," her story begins, and goes on to poignantly chronicle her childhood experiences, ending with Guy's birth. "Her portrait is a biblical study of life in the midst of death," Baldwin said about the highly praised book, which Angelou later adapted into a film