Published: 26/01/1984
One of the most magnificently perceptive memoirs of growing up a Black woman in twentieth century America, the first of Angelou’s seven volumes of autobiography is a spellbinding combination of intense joy and extreme suffering. Recounting her youth in the Deep South of the 1930s, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a milestone in the history of life-writing and a key work on racial injustice.
The first and best-known of Maya Angelou's extraordinary seven volumes of autobiography is a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer.
Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover.
Reviewing the book in 1970, The Washington Post commented, ‘There isn’t any easy, which is to say false line in the book. The distance, which is everything, is as true as a plumb line. She is outside and inside at the same time, looking at all of it with double vision.’
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9780860685111
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 252 g
Dimensions: 196 x 128 x 26 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman.' - President Barack Obama
'The poems and stories she wrote... were gifts of wisdom and wit, courage and grace.' - President Bill Clinton
'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace ... She will always be the rainbow in my clouds.' - Oprah Winfrey
'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate.' - Toni Morrison
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“A painful honest memoir”
Whilst I have a wide range of reading tastes, this is one that I would not normally consider. It is an autobiography of Maya, a black girl growing up in the depression era of America with the dreadful prejudice that... More
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
The first - and arguably the best - in Maya Angelous' series of autobiographies. Her story is heartbreaking and uplifting all at once. From her childhood as an awkward, and often abused, black child in the... More
“It will touch people for many years to come”
Prior to reading this book, I had heard of Maya Angelou, but had no real knowledge of her.
Raised in rural Arkansas by her grandparents, the young Marguerite Johnson (known as Ritie, only later Maya) and her brother...
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