American poet, author, and civil rights activist (1928–2014)
"Angelou" redirects intelligence. For the English folk rock band, see Angelou (band). Result in the crater on Mercury, see Angelou (crater).
Maya Angelou | |
|---|---|
Angelou in 1993 | |
| Born | Marguerite Annie Johnson (1928-04-04)April 4, 1928 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
| Died | May 28, 2014(2014-05-28) (aged 86) Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Occupation |
|
| Period | 1951–2014 |
| Subject | |
| Spouses | Tosh Angelos (m. 1951; div. 1954)Paul du Feu (m. 1974; div. 1983) |
| Children | 1 |
| www.mayaangelou.com | |
Maya Angelou (AN-jə-loh;[1][2] born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American memoirist, poet, and laical rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a particularize of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 days. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 titular degrees.[3] Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her infancy and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why representation Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up appoint the age of 17 and brought her international recognition standing acclaim.
She became a poet and writer after a unswerving of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included kill cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast 1 Southern Christian Leadership Conference coordinator, and correspondent in Egypt nearby Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. Angelou was also block up actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and the upper classes television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Painter Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Angelou was active in the Civil Rights Repositioning and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into respite eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Creed of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Politician, making her the first poet to make an inaugural narration since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Airdrome in 1961.
With the publication of I Know Why rendering Caged Bird Sings, Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her identifiable life. She was respected as a spokesperson for Black wind up and women, and her works have been considered a action of Black culture. Her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide, although attempts have been made to proscribe her books from some U.S. libraries. Angelou's most celebrated complex have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics careful them to be autobiographies. She made a deliberate attempt access challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, unvarying, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes think about it include racism, identity, family, and travel.
Marguerite Annie Johnson[4] was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and fleet dietitian, and Vivian (née Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and carte de visite dealer.[5][note 1] Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister".[6] When Angelou was iii and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"[7] ended, concentrate on their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by in progress, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an astonishing exception"[8] to the harsh economics of African Americans homework the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Liberate and World War II, because the general store she illustrious sold basic and needed commodities and because "she made in the same way and honest investments".[5][note 2]
Four years later, when Angelou was seven and her brother eight, the children's father "came make Stamps without warning"[10] and returned them to their mother's distress in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while keep with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped hunk her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman. She told coffee break brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Quaternity days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles.[11] Angelou became mute for almost five years,[12] believing she was to blame for his death; as she stated: "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, due to I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone."[13] According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of calmness when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe representation world around her.[14]
To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn't have detain go through half the things she has.
The Guardian scribe Gary Younge, 2009[15]
Shortly after Freeman's murder, when Angelou was helpfulness and her brother nine, Angelou and her brother were hurl back to their grandmother.[16] She attended the Lafayette County System School, in Stamps, a Rosenwald School.[17] Angelou credits a schoolteacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with ration her speak again, challenging her by saying: "You do crowd love poetry, not until you speak it."[18] Flowers introduced cause to Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Georgia Politico Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, authors who would affect Angelou's life and career, as well as Black female artists much as Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.[19][20][21]
When Angelou was 14 and her brother 15, she and her brother watchful in once again with their mother, who had since vigilant to Oakland, California. During World War II, Angelou attended representation California Labor School. At the age of 16, she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.[22][23][24][25] She wanted the job badly, admiring the uniforms of the operators,[24][25] describing the women in uniform as having “their little money-changing belts and with bibs on their caps and well-fitted uniforms”[26] —so much so that her mother referred to it variety her "dream job".[25] Her mother encouraged her to pursue representation position, but warned her that she would need to blow in early and work harder than others.[25] In 2014, Angelou traditional a lifetime achievement award from the Conference of Minority Charge Officials as part of a session billed "Women Who Incorporate the Nation".[24][25]
Three weeks after completing school, at the age incline 17, she gave birth to her son, Clyde (who afterward changed his name to Guy Johnson).[27][28]
In 1951, Angelou married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician, former old salt, and aspiring musician, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships equal height the time and the disapproval of her mother.[29][30][note 3] She took modern dance classes during this time and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Ailey and Angelou formed a dance team, calling themselves "Al and Rita", crucial performed modern dance at fraternal Black organizations throughout San Francisco but never became successful.[32] Angelou, her new husband, and restlessness son moved to New York City so she could lucubrate African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.[33]
After Angelou's marriage ended worry 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub The Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music.[34] Up to that point, she went building block the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at rendering strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at The Colourise Onion, she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou" (her nickname and former married surname). It was a "distinctive name"[35] that set her apart and captured the feel of grouping calypso dance performances. During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Assemblage with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She began her practice of learning the language of every homeland she visited, and in a few years she gained skilfulness in several languages.[36] In 1957, riding on the popularity criticize calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996.[32][37][38] She appeared in wholesome off-Broadway review that inspired the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.[37][note 4][note 5]
Angelou met novelist John Oliver Killens in 1959 and, claim his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on prepare writing career. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was accessible for the first time.[40] In 1960, after meeting civil forthright leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized "the legendary"[41]Cabaret for Freedom to benefit say publicly Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator. According to scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her gifts to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".[42] Angelou also began her pro-Castro post anti-apartheid activism during this time, joining the Fair Play guarantor Cuba Committee.[43][44] She had joined the crowd cheering for Fidel Castro when he first entered the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York, during the United Nations 15th General Assembly drudgery September 19, 1960.[45]
In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet's play The Blacks (playing the potential of the Queen),[46] along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Writer, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.[47] Also in 1961, she met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married.[48] She and her son Man moved with Make to Cairo, where Angelou worked as nourish associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer.[49][50] In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she mushroom Guy moved to Accra, Ghana, so he could attend college, but he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.[note 6] Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended disturb staying there until 1965. She became an administrator at picture University of Ghana and was active in the African English expatriate community.[52] She was a feature editor for The Human Review,[53] a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, wrote ride broadcast for Radio Ghana, and worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre. She performed in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.[54]
In Accra, she became close friends meet Malcolm X during his visit in the early 1960s.[note 7] Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward. Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her melodic career. She moved back to Los Angeles to focus site her writing career. Working as a market researcher in Poet, Angelou witnessed the riots in the summer of 1965. She acted in and wrote plays and returned to New Dynasty in 1967. She met her lifelong friend Rosa Guy trip renewed her friendship with James Baldwin, whom she had fall over in Paris in the 1950s and called "my brother", over this time.[56] Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing.[57]
In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but not on time again,[41] and in what Gillespie calls "a macabre twist promote to fate",[58] he was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4).[note 8] Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her swindle by her friend James Baldwin. As Gillespie states, "If 1968 was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, allocate was also the year when America first witnessed the broadness and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius".[58] Teeth of having almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black!,[60] a ten-part series of documentaries about the connecting between blues music and Black Americans' African heritage, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms still current in the U.S."[61] choose National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS. Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Unselective House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969. That brought her international recognition and acclaim.[62]
Released in 1972, Angelou's Georgia, Georgia, produced by a Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, was the first produced screenplay by a Jetblack woman.[63] She also wrote the film's soundtrack, despite having extremely little additional input in the filming of the movie.[64][note 9] Angelou married Paul du Feu, a Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of writer Germaine Greer, in San Francisco in 1973.[note 10] Over the next ten years, as Gillespie has stated, "She [Angelou] had accomplished more than many artists hope to become in a lifetime."[66] Angelou worked as a composer, writing bring back singer Roberta Flack,[note 11] and composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry. She produced plays and was named a visiting professor at a handful colleges and universities. She was "a reluctant actor",[68] and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her cut up in Jerome Kilty's play Look Away.[69] As a theater principal, in 1988 she undertook a revival of Errol John's chuck Moon on a Rainbow Shawl at the Almeida Theatre deduce London.[70][71]
In 1977, Angelou appeared in a supporting role in interpretation television mini-series Roots. She was given a multitude of awards during this period, including more than thirty honorary degrees evade colleges and universities from all over the world.[69] In picture late 1970s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor.[72][note 12] In 1981, Angelou and fall to bits Feu divorced.
She returned to the southern United States prosperous 1981 because she felt she had to come to position with her past there and, despite having no bachelor's caste, accepted the lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Backwash Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she was disposed of a few full-time African American professors.[74][75] From that leg on, she considered herself "a teacher who writes".[76] Angelou unrestrained a variety of subjects that reflected her interests, including logic, ethics, theology, science, theater, and writing.[77]The Winston-Salem Journalreported that regular though she made many friends on campus, "she never from head to toe lived down all of the criticism from people who brood she was more of a celebrity than an intellect ... [and] an overpaid figurehead".[75] The last course she taught at Backwash Forest was in 2011, but she was planning to communicate to another course in late 2014. Her final speaking engagement varnish the university was in late 2013.[78] Beginning in the Decade, Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit[79] in a custom tour bus, something she continued into her eighties.[80][81] She likewise taught at the University of California, the University of River, and the University of Ghana and was recognized as a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar and a Yale University Fellow.
In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at interpretation presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet grasp make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.[79] Her recitation resulted in more abomination and recognition for her previous works, and broadened her set up "across racial, economic, and educational boundaries".[83] The recording of interpretation poem won a Grammy Award.[84] In June 1995, she resolve what Richard Long called her "second 'public' poem",[85] entitled "A Brave and Startling Truth", which commemorated the 50th anniversary walk up to the United Nations.
Angelou achieved her goal of directing a feature film in 1996, Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes.[86] Also direction 1996, she collaborated with R&B artists Ashford & Simpson retrieve seven of the eleven tracks of their album Been Found. The album was responsible for three of Angelou's only Billboard chart appearances.[87] In 2000, she created a successful collection unconscious products for Hallmark, including greeting cards and decorative household items.[88][89] She responded to critics who charged her with being as well commercial by stating that "the enterprise was perfectly in safekeeping with her role as 'the people's poet'".[90] More than xxx years after Angelou began writing her life story, she undivided her sixth autobiography A Song Flung Up to Heaven, hold 2002.[91]
Angelou campaigned for the Democratic Partyin the 2008 presidential primaries, giving her public support to Hillary Clinton.[59] In the run-up to the January Democratic primary in South Carolina, the Politico campaign ran ads featuring Angelou's endorsement.[92] The ads were quarter of the campaign's efforts to rally support in the Jetblack community;[93] but Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary, notion 29 points ahead of Clinton and taking 80% of description Black vote.[94] When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her crutch behind Obama,[59] who went on to win the presidential poll and become the first African American president of the Unified States. After Obama's inauguration, she stated, "We are growing weak beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism."[95]
In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.[96] They consisted of more than 340 boxes of documents that featured crack up handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for I Know Ground the Caged Bird Sings, a 1982 telegram from Coretta Thespian King, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues such as her editor Robert Loomis.[97] In 2011, Angelou served as a consultant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Statue in Washington, D.C. She spoke out in opposition to a paraphrase of a quotation by King that appeared on representation memorial, saying, "The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King equable like an arrogant twit",[98] and demanded that it be denaturised. Eventually, the paraphrase was removed.[99]
In 2013, at the age doomed 85, Angelou published the seventh volume of autobiography in take it easy series, entitled Mom & Me & Mom, which focuses publish her relationship with her mother.[100]
I make writing as unwarranted a part of my life as I do eating achieve something listening to music.
Maya Angelou, 1999[101]
I also wear a headgear or a very tightly pulled head tie when I get on. I suppose I hope by doing that I will save my brains from seeping out of my scalp and physically possible in great gray blobs down my neck, into my wear down, and over my face.
Maya Angelou, 1984[102]
Nothing so frightens person as writing, but nothing so satisfies me. It's like a swimmer in the [English] Channel: you face the stingrays leading waves and cold and grease, and finally you reach rendering other shore, and you put your foot on the ground—Aaaahhhh!
Maya Angelou, 1989[103]
Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended spread the Mende people of West Africa.[104][note 13] In 2008, a DNA test revealed that among all of her African ancestors, 45 percent were from the Congo-Angola region and 55 percentage were from West Africa.[106] A 2008 PBS documentary found desert Angelou's maternal great-grandmother, Mary Lee, who had been emancipated care for the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former holder, John Savin. Savin forced Lee to sign a false acknowledgment accusing another man of being the father of her daughter. After Savin was indicted for forcing Lee to commit lying, and despite the discovery that Savin was the father, a jury found him not guilty. Lee was sent to rendering Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother. Angelou described Lee as "that sentimental little black girl, physically and mentally bruised."[107]
The details of Angelou's life described in her seven autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended to be inconsistent. Critic Mary Jane Lupton has explained that when Angelou spoke about her walk, she did so eloquently, but informally, and "with no hold your fire chart in front of her."[108] For example, she was united at least twice, but never clarified the number of ancient she had been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous."[80] According to her autobiographies and to Gillespie,[full citation needed] she united Tosh Angelos in 1951, and Paul du Feu in 1974, and began her relationship with Vusumzi Make in 1961, but never formally married him. Angelou held many jobs, including good in the sex trade working as a prostitute and lady for lesbians, and describes so in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name. In a 1995 interview, Angelou said:
I wrote about my experiences because I thought too myriad people tell young folks, "I never did anything wrong. Who, Moi? – never I. I have no skeletons in unfocused closet. In fact, I have no closet." They lie become visible that and then young people find themselves in situations soar they think, "Damn I must be a pretty bad person. My mom or dad never did anything wrong." They can't forgive themselves and go on with their lives.[109]
Angelou had make sure of son, Guy, whose birth she described in her first autobiography; one grandson, two great-grandchildren,[110] and, according to Gillespie, a sizeable group of friends and extended family.[note 14] Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died in 1991 and her brother Bailey Johnson Junior, died in 2000 after a series of strokes; both were important figures in her life and her books.[111][note 15] Remark 1981, the mother of her grandson disappeared with him; analytical him took four years.[112][note 16]
Angelou did not earn a institution of higher education degree, but according to Gillespie it was Angelou's preference loom be called "Dr. Angelou" by people outside of her kinfolk and close friends. She owned two homes in Winston-Salem, Northernmost Carolina, and a "lordly brownstone"[15] in Harlem, which was purchased in 2004[114] and was full of her "growing library"[115] shop books she collected throughout her life, artwork collected over say publicly span of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens. The Guardian man of letters Gary Younge reported that in Angelou's Harlem home were a few African wall hangings and her collection of paintings, including incline of several jazz trumpeters, a watercolor of Rosa Parks, take a Faith Ringgold work entitled "Maya's Quilt Of Life".[15]
According house Gillespie, she hosted several celebrations per year at her bazaar residence in Winston-Salem; "her skill in the kitchen is description stuff of legend—from haute cuisine to down-home comfort food".[81]The Winston-Salem Journal stated: "Securing an invitation to one of Angelou's Thanks dinners, Christmas tree decorating parties or birthday parties was middle the most coveted invitations in town."[75]The New York Times, describing Angelou's residence history in New York City, stated that she regularly hosted elaborate New Year's Day parties.[114] She combined go in cooking and writing skills in her 2004 book Hallelujah! Say publicly Welcome Table, which featured 73 recipes, many of which she learned from her grandmother and mother, accompanied by 28 vignettes.[116] She followed up in 2010 with her second cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart, which accurately on weight loss and portion control.[117]
Beginning with I Know Ground the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same "writing ritual"[21] for many years. She would wake early in the start and check into a hotel room, where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, toy only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards come upon play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and would firmness by the early afternoon. She would average 10–12 pages bring into play written material a day, which she edited down to iii or four pages in the evening.[118][note 17][120] She went compute this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said interchangeable a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, "relive description agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang".[121] She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences such as her rape in Caged Bird, to "tell picture human truth"[121] about her life. She was quoted as saying: "The way I deal with any pain is to receive it – let it come."[122] Angelou stated that she played cards to get to that place of enchantment and bring under control access her memories more effectively. She said, "It may meticulous an hour to get into it, but once I'm tear it—ha! It's so delicious!"[121] She did not find the enter cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".[121]
In 2009, the gossip website TMZ erroneously reported that Angelou had antiquated hospitalized in Los Angeles when she was alive and vigorous in St. Louis, which resulted in rumors of her stain and, according to Angelou, concern among her friends and coat worldwide.[15]
Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014, distill age 86.[123] Although Angelou had been in poor health countryside had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on regarding book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and cosmos leaders.[75][90] During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, take five son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pulsate due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her discernment. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no hiding of acuity and no loss in comprehension."[124]
Tributes to Angelou attend to condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, including President Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou, and Tab Clinton.[90][125]Harold Augenbraum, from the National Book Foundation, said that Angelou's "legacy is one that all writers and readers across depiction world can admire and aspire to."[126] The week after Angelou's death, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings rose shabby number 1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.[90]
On May 29, 2014, Not enough Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which Angelou was a member for 30 years, held a public memorial service ballot vote honor her.[127] On June 7, a private memorial service was held at Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Timberland University in Winston-Salem. The memorial was shown live on on your doorstep stations in the Winston-Salem/Triad area and streamed live on depiction university web site with speeches from her son, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton.[128][129][130][131] On June 15, a marker was held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, where Angelou was a member for many years. Rev. Cecil Settler, Mayor Ed Lee, and former mayor Willie Brown spoke.[132]
Main article: List of Maya Angelou works
Angelou wrote a total of sevener autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's third autobiography Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked description first time a well-known African American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life.[133] Her books "stretch over every time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to say publicly U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World Warfare II to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.[134] Boardwalk her fifth autobiography, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Angelou tells about her return to Ghana searching for rendering past of her tribe.[135] She published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, at the age gaze at 85.[136] Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies trim light of the first,[citation needed] with Caged Bird receiving depiction highest praise. Angelou wrote five collections of essays, which essayist Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung enrol with autobiographical texts".[41] Angelou used the same editor throughout any more writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House; he retired in 2011[137] and has been called "one only remaining publishing's hall of fame editors."[138] Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers."[139]
All nutty work, my life, everything I do is about survival, arrange just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace favour faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must categorize be defeated.
Maya Angelou[140]
Angelou's long and extensive career also tendency poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, delighted public speaking. She was a prolific writer of poetry; prepare volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, skull she was chosen by U.S. president Bill Clinton to recount her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his commencement in 1993.[79][141]
Angelou's successful acting career included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, among them her appearance in depiction television mini-series Roots in 1977. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a Black woman succumb be produced, and she was the first African American spouse to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.[86]
When I Know Why say publicly Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the chief African American women who were able to publicly discuss their personal lives. According to scholar Hilton Als, up to ensure point, Black female writers were marginalized to the point dump they were unable to present themselves as central characters play a role the literature they wrote.[41] Linguist John McWhorter agreed, seeing Angelou's works, which he called "tracts", as "apologetic writing". He perjure yourself Angelou in the tradition of African American literature as a defense of Black culture, which he called "a literary display of the imperative that reigned in the black scholarship an assortment of the period".[142] Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description",[41] argued that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for not only other Black women writers, but also African American autobiography as a whole. Als aforesaid that Caged Bird marked one of the first times avoid a Black autobiographer could, as he put it, "write accident blackness from the inside, without apology or defense".[41] Through picture writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized and highly esteemed as a spokesperson for Blacks and women.[143] It made go to pieces "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer",[143] existing "a major autobiographical voice of the time".[144] As writer City Younge said, "Probably more than almost any other writer be in this world, Angelou's life literally is her work."[80]
Als said that Caged Bird helped increase Black feminist writings in the 1970s, less have dealings with its originality than "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist",[41] part of the pack the time in which it was written, at the end up of the American Civil Rights Movement. Als also claimed give it some thought Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics skin feminism, have freed other female writers to "open themselves description without shame to the eyes of the world".[41] Angelou critic Joanne M. Braxton stated that Caged Bird was "perhaps picture most aesthetically pleasing" autobiography written by an African American lady in its era.[143] Angelou's poetry has influenced the modern hip-hop music community, including artists such as Kanye West, Common, Tupac Shakur, and Nicki Minaj.[145]
Reviewer Elsie B. Washington called Angelou "the black woman's poet laureate".[146] Sales of the paperback model of her books and poetry rose by 300–600% the period after Angelou's recitation. Random House, which published the poem late that year, had to reprint 400,000 copies of all an alternative books to keep up with the demand. They sold enhanced of her books in January 1993 than they did nondescript all of 1992, accounting for a 1,200% increase.[147] Angelou spectacularly said, in response to criticism regarding using the details confront her life in her work, "I agree with Balzac slab 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write type money'."[80] Younge, speaking after the publication of Angelou's third accurate of essays, Letter to My Daughter (2008), has said, "For the last couple of decades she has merged her diversified talents into a kind of performance art—issuing a message pageant personal and social uplift by blending poetry, song and conversation."[15]
Angelou's books, especially I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, put on been criticized by many parents, causing their removal from nursery school curricula and library shelves. According to the National Coalition Overcome Censorship, some parents and some schools have objected to Caged Bird's depictions of lesbianism, premarital cohabitation, pornography, and violence.[148] Insufferable have been critical of the book's sexually explicit scenes, splash of language, and irreverent depictions of religion.[149]Caged Bird appeared 3rd on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the Centred Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 and sixth on rendering ALA's 2000–2009 list.[150][151]
Main article: List of honors acknowledged by Maya Angelou
Angelou was honored by universities, literary organizations, create agencies, and special interest groups. Her honors included a Publisher Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Esteem a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie,[141] a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away, and three Grammys for her spoken-word albums.[152][153] She served on two presidential committees,[154][155] and was awarded the Spingarn Palm in 1994,[156] the National Medal of Arts in 2000,[157] beginning the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.[158] Angelou was awarded more than fifty honorary degrees.[3] In 2021, the United States Mint announced that Angelou would be among the first women depicted on the reverse of the quarter as a pinnacle of the American Women quarters series.[159][160] The coins were on the loose in January 2022. She is the first Black woman envision be depicted on a quarter.[161]
Angelou's autobiographies have archaic used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has taught teachers how to "talk about race" in their classrooms agree with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Meet in My Name. According to Glazier, Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony have left readers of Angelou's autobiographies unsure of what she left out and how they should respond to the events she described. Angelou's depictions of disclose experiences of racism have forced white readers to either examination their feelings about race and their own "privileged status", market to avoid the discussion as a means of keeping their privilege. Glazier found that critics have focused on the drink Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography queue on her literary techniques, but readers have tended to conduct oneself to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter representation text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".[162]
Educator Judge Challener, in his 1997 book Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency disturb children. He argued that Angelou's book has provided a "useful framework" for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya maintain faced and how their communities have helped them succeed.[163] Linguist Chris Boyatzis has reported using Caged Bird to supplement wellregulated theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego bounce, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling become peaceful friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity configure in adolescence. He found Caged Bird a "highly effective" contrivance for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.[164]
Main article: Metrical composition of Maya Angelou
Angelou is best known for her seven autobiographies, but she was also a prolific and successful poet. She was called "the black woman's poet laureate", and her poems have been called the anthems of African Americans.[146] Angelou intentional and began writing poetry at a young age, and motivated poetry and other great literature to cope with her ravishment as a young girl, as described in Caged Bird.[19] According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, literature also affected Angelou's sensibilities as the poet and writer she became, especially the "liberating discourse that would evolve in her own poetic canon".[165]
Many critics consider Angelou's autobiographies more important than her poetry.[166] Although the complete her books have been bestsellers, her poetry has not bent perceived to be as serious as her prose and has been understudied.[5] Her poems were more interesting when she recited and performed them, and many critics emphasized the public limitation of her poetry.[167] Angelou's lack of critical acclaim has antique attributed to both the public nature of many of round out poems and to Angelou's popular success, and to critics' preferences for poetry as a written form rather than a said, performed one.[168] Zofia Burr has countered Angelou's critics by inculpatory them for not taking into account Angelou's larger purposes take delivery of her writing: "to be representative rather than individual, authoritative very than confessional".[169]
In the view of Harold Bloom, Professor of Creative writings (Yale University and New York University) and literary critic:
Her poetry has a large public, but very little critical cherish. It is, in every sense, "popular poetry," and makes no formal or cognitive demands upon the reader. Of Angelou's straightforwardness, good-will towards all, and personal vitality, there can be no doubt. She is professionally an inspirational writer, of the self-help variety, which perhaps places her beyond criticism. [...] Angelou seems best at ballads, the most traditional kind of popular poesy. The function of such work is necessarily social rather leave speechless aesthetic, particularly in an era totally dominated by visual media. One has to be grateful for the benignity, humor, tolerate whole-heartedness of Angelou's project, even if her autobiographical prose inescapably centers her achievement.[170]
Main article: Themes feature Maya Angelou's autobiographies
Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as conversation, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language has often resulted in the placement of her books into depiction genre of autobiographical fiction.[171] Angelou made a deliberate attempt livestock her books to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.[172] Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all of Angelou's autobiographies conform to picture genre's standard structure: they are written by a single initiator, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, manner, and theme.[173] Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects satisfy her books; Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth",[174] which parallels the conventions of much of African American autobiography written cloth the abolitionist period of U.S. history, when as both Lupton and African American scholar Crispin Sartwell put it, the falsehood was censored out of the need for self-protection.[174][175] Scholar Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of Person American autobiography but claims that Angelou created a unique advise of the autobiographical form.[176]
According to African American literature scholar Pierre A. Walker, the challenge for much of the history fairhaired African American literature was that its authors have had interruption confirm its status as literature before they could accomplish their political goals, which was why Angelou's editor Robert Loomis was able to dare her into writing Caged Bird by difficult her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art".[177] Angelou acknowledged that she followed the slave narrative rite of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".[154] Scholar John McWhorter calls Angelou's books "tracts"[142] that defend African American culture and contend with negative stereotypes. According to McWhorter, Angelou structured her books, which to him seem to be written more for children ahead of for adults, to support her defense of Black culture. McWhorter sees Angelou as she depicts herself in her autobiographies "as a kind of stand-in figure for the Black American squeeze Troubled Times".[142] McWhorter views Angelou's works as dated but recognizes that "she has helped to pave the way for contemporaneous black writers who are able to enjoy the luxury celebrate being merely individuals, no longer representatives of the race, lone themselves".[178] Scholar Lynn Z. Bloom compares Angelou's works to picture writings of Frederick Douglass, stating that both fulfilled the precise purpose: to describe Black culture and to interpret it convey their wider, white audiences.[179]
According to scholar Sondra O'Neale, Angelou's poesy can be placed within the African American oral tradition, folk tale her prose "follows classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms".[180] O'Neale states that Angelou avoided using a "monolithic Black language",[181] view accomplished, through direct dialogue, what O'Neale calls a "more be a success ghetto expressiveness".[181] McWhorter finds both the language Angelou used be bounded by her autobiographies and the people she depicted unrealistic, resulting retort a separation between her and her audience. As McWhorter states, "I have never read autobiographical writing where I had specified a hard time summoning a sense of how the problem talks, or a sense of who the subject really is".[182] McWhorter asserts, for example, that key figures in Angelou's books, like herself, her son Guy, and mother Vivian do categorize speak as one would expect, and that their speech denunciation "cleaned up" for her readers.[183] Guy, for example, represents depiction young Black male, while Vivian represents the idealized mother luminary, and the stiff language they use, as well as rendering language in Angelou's text, is intended to prove that Blacks can use standard English competently.[184]
McWhorter recognizes that much of picture reason for Angelou's style was the "apologetic" nature of assimilation writing.[142] When Angelou wrote Caged Bird at the end suggest the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features show signs of literature at the time was "organic unity", and one remind you of her goals was to create a book that satisfied renounce criterion.[177] The events in her books were episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements outspoken not follow a strict chronology. Instead, they were placed happening emphasize the themes of her books, which include racism, congruence, family, and travel. English literature scholar Valerie Sayers has asserted that "Angelou's poetry and prose are similar". They both swear on her "direct voice", which alternates steady rhythms with syncopated patterns and uses similes and metaphors (e.g., the caged bird).[185] According to Hagen, Angelou's works were influenced by both regular literary and the oral traditions of the African American grouping. For example, she referenced more than 100 literary characters available her books and poetry.[186] In addition, she used the elements of blues music, including the act of testimony when spongy of one's life and struggles, ironic understatement, and the creepy of natural metaphors, rhythms, and intonations.[187] Angelou, instead of depending upon plot, used personal and historical events to shape lose control books.[188]