As we review the works of renowned author and poet Maya Angelou, the passion, power and extraordinary life experiences of one of the greatest writers of our time comes shining through. She is best known for a series of autobiographical novels beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings published in 1971. Angelou has been praised for confronting both the racist and sexual pressures on black women and her work combines her perspective as an individual with her involvement in larger social and political movements, including civil rights. Within this context, I will show how Angelou's prose and poetry reflect the tribulations that she has encountered in her life.

Maya Angelou was born April 4, 1928 as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson. Her father was a brash, vain former doorman and later a Navy dietitian. Her mother was a fun loving, exceedingly beautiful woman who was trained as a nurse but made her living "cutting poker games in gambling parlors" (Angelou Caged Bird 174). Her parents soon divorced and she was sent, rather unceremoniously, along with her older brother, Bailey, to live with her paternal grandmother in rural Stamps, Arkan

To support her child and herself, she took a variety of jobs - dancing in night clubs, cooking at a Creole cafe, removing paint at a dent and body shop, and serving as a madam and sometimes prostitute at a San Diego brothel. (Meltzer 275). While appearing as a dancer in a cabaret, she changed her name to Maya Angelou. Her experience there led to an acting and singing career and she joined a U. S. State Department production of Porgy and Bess throughout Europe. When she was thirty, Angelou moved to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she became involved in the civil rights movement, serving as the northern coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She later moved to Egypt, where she edited an English-language newspaper, and then to Ghana, working as a writer and editor.

In 1969, Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. An account of her childhood up to the birth of her son, it is her most critically acclaimed work and was nominated for a National Book Award. Gather Together in My Name (1974) describes her search for identity and her struggle for survival as a young, unwed mother. In The Heart of a Woman (1981) she describes her emergence as a writer and a political activist. Based on her experience in Ghana, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) examines the relationship between Africa and black culture in America. Angelou has written several plays for screen, stage and television, as well as several volumes of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize nominated Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie (1971), And Still I Rise (1976), and Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983).

Graduating from the eighth grade second in her class, Maya looked forward to attending high school with Bailey. Things didn't work out quite that way. Bailey had gone into town to run some errands for Willie and returned visibly shaken and frightened. Crossing a bridge, Bailey had seen several men pulling the body of a dead black man from the water. Momma knew that another black man had been lynched by a white mob and made up her mind that the children would be safer in California, where their mother had remarried and was living once again.

In 1930, Stamps was a rural town of fewer than twenty-five hundred people. Less than forty miles from the Louisiana border, it was deep in the heart of the Cotton Belt (Meltzer 4). An invisible line divided one section of town from the other. Poor backcountry whites lived on one side and even poorer blacks lived on the other. A scattering of small shops and houses lined the main street of the white part of town. In the black section, a dirt road led to the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store where slave-like field workers passed through to buy supplies each day.

To Maya and Bailey, St. Louis was a world apart from the dusty little town of Stamps, Arkansas. Big, noisy, and cluttered, the black neighborhood was like a cowboy frontier town with its pool halls, gambling houses, and bars. The children had their first jelly beans, salted peanuts, and bulging ham sandwiches. Maya and Bailey were far ahead of their classmates in all subjects at the huge, brick fortress of the local elementary school and they quickly moved on to higher grades.

sas. Maya Angelou describes the scene in the opening lines of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

The 'boys'? Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday. Boys? It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abominations (Angelou, Caged Bird 14).

Vivian Baxter was now married to a successful San Francisco businessman and she happily welcomed her children into her new home. Her husband, whom the children can to know as Daddy Clidell, was a generous and loving man who

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Approximate Word count = 3393
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page double spaced)