Maya Angelou

The life experiences of Maya Angelou--author, poet, actress, singer, dancer, playwright, director, producer--became the cornerstone of her most acclaimed work, a multivolume autobiography that traces the foundations of her identity as a twentieth-century American Black woman. Beginning with the best-selling I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou's autobiographical books chart her beginnings in rural segregated Arkansas and urban St. Louis, her turbulent adolescence in California through her adult triumphs as a performing artist and writer, her work in the civil rights movement, her travels to Africa, and her return to the United States. "One of the geniuses of Afro-American serial autobiography," according to Houston A. Baker in the New York Times Book Review, Angelou has been praised for the...