Maya Angelou
Angelou turned a childhood shaped by hardship and racism into a body of work about resilience, dignity and identity. She became one of the most widely read and honoured American writers of her time.
Personality
Angelou lived boldly and tried many lives before settling on writing: as a teenager she became San Francisco's first Black female streetcar conductor, then worked as a dancer and calypso singer and toured Europe with Porgy and Bess. She approached writing with a fixed ritual, checking into a hotel room early each morning with legal pads, a Bible, a thesaurus and a deck of cards, drafting ten to twelve pages and cutting them to three or four by evening. She said the process meant reliving painful experiences in order to tell the human truth. Later she taught for decades as a professor at Wake Forest University.
Under pressure
After a traumatic experience at eight, Angelou stopped speaking for nearly five years; a teacher drew her back by encouraging her to recite poetry, and literature became her way back into the world. As an adult she held a string of jobs while building a career as a performer, and in the 1960s she put her energy into the civil rights movement. Her memoir's frank account of racism and abuse led some parents to seek its removal from schools, but it has remained widely taught. She kept returning to hard memories across seven volumes of autobiography rather than setting them aside.
The arc
Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, she spent much of her childhood at her grandparents' home in segregated Stamps, Arkansas. In the 1950s she performed as a singer and dancer, taking the stage name Maya Angelou. In the 1960s she served as Northern Coordinator of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spent years in Cairo and Ghana, where she became close to Malcolm X. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) made her internationally known. In 1981 she became Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, and she died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on 28 May 2014.
Legacy
Angelou published seven autobiographies, several essay collections and many volumes of poetry. She was the first Black woman to have an original screenplay produced, Georgia, Georgia (1972), and her poetry collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She received the National Medal of Arts in 2000, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, three Grammy Awards for spoken-word albums and dozens of honorary degrees. In 2022 she became the first Black woman depicted on a US quarter, and her memoirs remain widely taught in American schools.
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