Maya Angelou

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the life and work of Maya Angelou are fully intertwined and how the poetic adventure of her life, her personal odyssey, is a true representation of all Americans of African decent. It looks at how throughout her life and work, Maya Angelou has triumphantly created and re-created the self, endowing her life story with sympathetic tone and symbolic significance. It discusses her life from her birth as Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri through her career as a dancer and writer. It also reviews her most famous autobiographical work, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

From the Paper:

"Angelou's dysfunctional childhood enabled her to struggle with maturity and therefore became determined to prove she was a girl/woman of character and strength. The patterns established in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings continue in Angelou's other books, which encompass her life. They include Gather Together in My Name (1974); Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976); The Heart of a Woman (1981); and All God's Children Need Walking Shoes (1986). But it is solely in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that Angelou instills the essence of her autobiographical impulse and turns it into lyric imagery touched by the everlasting realism of truth."

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