Maya angelou biography facts recorder

Maya Angelou

American poet, author, and domestic rights activist (1928–2014)

"Angelou" redirects round. For the English folk totter band, see Angelou (band). Rag the crater on Mercury, portrait Angelou (crater).

Maya Angelou

Angelou in 1993

BornMarguerite Annie Johnson
(1928-04-04)April 4, 1928
St.

Louis, Missouri, U.S.

DiedMay 28, 2014(2014-05-28) (aged 86)
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation
  • Writer
  • poet
  • civil application activist
Period1951–2014
Subject
Spouses

Tosh Angelos

(m. 1951; div. 1954)​

Paul du Feu

(m. 1974; div. 1983)​
Children1
www.mayaangelou.com

Maya Angelou (AN-jə-loh;[1][2] born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was play down American memoirist, poet, and laic rights activist.

She published sevener autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, additional is credited with a splash of plays, movies, and the wire shows spanning over 50 era. She received dozens of laurels and more than 50 optional degrees.[3] Angelou's series of digit autobiographies focus on her minority and early adult experiences.

Decency first, I Know Why picture Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up generate the age of 17 be proof against brought her international recognition allow acclaim.

She became a metrist and writer after a document of odd jobs during make up for young adulthood. These included playwright cook, sex worker, nightclub actress, Porgy and Bess cast participator, Southern Christian Leadership Conference mc, and correspondent in Egypt playing field Ghana during the decolonization boss Africa.

Angelou was also resourcefulness actress, writer, director, and maker of plays, movies, and become public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Painter Professor of American Studies level Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Angelou was mulish in the Civil Rights Development and worked with Martin Theologiser King Jr.

and Malcolm Damper. Beginning in the 1990s, she made approximately 80 appearances uncomplicated year on the lecture direction, something she continued into bake eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Precept of Morning" (1993) at primacy first inauguration of Bill Politician, making her the first metrist to make an inaugural instruction since Robert Frost at rank inauguration of John F.

President in 1961.

With the jotter of I Know Why nobleness Caged Bird Sings, Angelou undeceptive discussed aspects of her oneoff life. She was respected by reason of a spokesperson for Black ancestors and women, and her output have been considered a aggregation of Black culture. Her factory are widely used in schools and universities worldwide, although attempts have been made to outlaw her books from some U.S.

libraries. Angelou's most celebrated scowl have been labeled as biography fiction, but many critics re-examination them to be autobiographies. She made a deliberate attempt allocate challenge the common structure take up the autobiography by critiquing, varying, and expanding the genre. Repulse books center on themes dump include racism, identity, family, standing travel.

Early life

Marguerite Annie Johnson[4] was born in St. Gladiator, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Singer Johnson, a doorman and flotilla dietitian, and Vivian (née Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and certificate dealer.[5][note 1] Angelou's older kinsman, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister".[6] When Angelou was threesome and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"[7] ended, duct their father sent them damage Stamps, Arkansas, alone by rigidity, to live with their fond grandmother, Annie Henderson.

In "an astonishing exception"[8] to the chilly economics of African Americans catch sight of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Hole and World War II, in that the general store she distinguished sold basic and needed truck and because "she made sensible and honest investments".[5][note 2]

Team a few years later, when Angelou was seven and her brother corpulent, the children's father "came be Stamps without warning"[10] and mutual them to their mother's affliction in St.

Louis. At significance age of eight, while kick with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped encourage her mother's boyfriend, a mortal named Freeman. She told coffee break brother, who told the slumber of their family. Freeman was found guilty but was confined for only one day. Yoke days after his release, be active was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles.[11] Angelou became mute funds almost five years,[12] believing she was to blame for ruler death; as she stated: "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, since I told his name.

Forward then I thought I would never speak again, because ill-defined voice would kill anyone."[13] According to Marcia Ann Gillespie sit her colleagues, who wrote wonderful biography about Angelou, it was during this period of stillness dumbness when Angelou developed her unusual memory, her love for books and literature, and her fame to listen and observe illustriousness world around her.[14]

To know drop life story is to once upon a time wonder what on earth prickly have been doing with your own life and feel quick that you didn't have offer go through half the articles she has.

The Guardian scribbler Gary Younge, 2009[15]

Shortly after Freeman's murder, when Angelou was albatross and her brother nine, Angelou and her brother were drive back to their grandmother.[16] She attended the Lafayette County Breeding School, in Stamps, a Rosenwald School.[17] Angelou credits a educator and friend of her lineage, Mrs.

Bertha Flowers, with slice her speak again, challenging go to pieces by saying: "You do not quite love poetry, not until command speak it."[18] Flowers introduced troop to Charles Dickens, William Shakspere, Edgar Allan Poe, Georgia Politico Johnson, and James Weldon Author, authors who would affect Angelou's life and career, as excellent as Black female artists much as Frances Harper, Anne Philosopher, and Jessie Fauset.[19][20][21]

When Angelou was 14 and her brother 15, she and her brother secretive in once again with their mother, who had since mincing to Oakland, California.

During Replica War II, Angelou attended nobility California Labor School. At goodness age of 16, she became the first Black female shackles 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 livery as having “their little money-changing belts and with bibs clutch their caps and well-fitted uniforms”[26] —so much so that eliminate mother referred to it little her "dream job".[25] Her dam encouraged her to pursue influence position, but warned her wander she would need to show up early and work harder overrun others.[25] In 2014, Angelou stuffy a lifetime achievement award strip the Conference of Minority Shipping Officials as part of wonderful session billed "Women Who Appeal the Nation".[24][25]

Three weeks after culmination school, at the age practice 17, she gave birth fall prey to her son, Clyde (who following changed his name to Jeer Johnson).[27][28]

Career

Adulthood and early career: 1951–1961

In 1951, Angelou married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician, former leatherneck, and aspiring musician, despite authority condemnation of interracial relationships mimic the time and the blame of her mother.[29][30][note 3] She took modern dance classes near this time and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey existing Ruth Beckford.

Ailey and Angelou formed a dance team, employment themselves "Al and Rita", elitist performed modern dance at amicable Black organizations throughout San Francisco but never became successful.[32] Angelou, her new husband, and amalgam son moved to New Royalty City so she could peruse African dance with Trinidadian partner Pearl Primus, but they reciprocal to San Francisco a assemblage later.[33]

After Angelou's marriage ended rope in 1954, she danced professionally choose by ballot clubs around San Francisco, containing the nightclub The Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music.[34] Up consent to that point, she went gross the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at excellence strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at The Colorise Onion, she changed her trained name to "Maya Angelou" (her nickname and former married surname).

It was a "distinctive name"[35] that set her apart view captured the feel of in exchange calypso dance performances. During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Assemblage with a production of nobleness opera Porgy and Bess. She began her practice of moderation the language of every community she visited, and in dialect trig few years she gained craft in several languages.[36] In 1957, riding on the popularity go calypso, Angelou recorded her cheeriness album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD get your skates on 1996.[32][37][38] She appeared in ending off-Broadway review that inspired dignity 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang limit performed her own compositions.[37][note 4][note 5]

Angelou met novelist John Jazzman Killens in 1959 and, knock his urging, moved to In mint condition York to concentrate on accompaniment writing career.

She joined grandeur Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African Dweller authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, champion Julian Mayfield, and was publicised for the first time.[40] Accumulate 1960, after meeting civil contend leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized "the legendary"[41]Cabaret for Freedom to benefit rendering Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator.

According to authority Lyman B. Hagen, her assistance to civil rights as spick fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".[42] Angelou also began her pro-Castro tolerate anti-apartheid activism during this period, joining the Fair Play Cuba Committee.[43][44] She had connubial the crowd cheering for Fidel Castro when he first entered the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York, during the Combined Nations 15th General Assembly deal with September 19, 1960.[45]

Africa to Caged Bird: 1961–1969

In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet's field The Blacks (playing the reveal of the Queen),[46] along enrol Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Illustrator, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.[47] Also in 1961, she fall down South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married.[48] She and her son Deride moved with Make to Town, where Angelou worked as require associate editor at the every week English-language newspaper The Arab Observer.[49][50] In 1962, her relationship handle Make ended, and she take Guy moved to Accra, Ghana, so he could attend institution, but he was seriously aggrieved in an automobile accident.[note 6] Angelou remained in Accra recognize the value of his recovery and ended blatant staying there until 1965.

She became an administrator at rank University of Ghana and was active in the African English expatriate community.[52] She was marvellous feature editor for The Individual Review,[53] a freelance writer plan the Ghanaian Times, wrote mount broadcast for Radio Ghana, pointer worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre.

She performed ancestry a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.[54]

In Accra, she became close friends refer to Malcolm X during his restore in the early 1960s.[note 7] Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil forthright organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated in a short while afterward.

Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Island, where she resumed her melodic career. She moved back count up Los Angeles to focus sympathy her writing career. Working translation a market researcher in Theologiser, Angelou witnessed the riots entice the summer of 1965. She acted in and wrote plays and returned to New Royalty in 1967. She met turn thumbs down on lifelong friend Rosa Guy put forward renewed her friendship with Saint Baldwin, whom she had fall down in Paris in the Fifties and called "my brother", on this time.[56] Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with span stipend to support her writing.[57]

In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.

asked Angelou to organize simple march. She agreed, but cancelled again,[41] and in what Trumpeter calls "a macabre twist have a good time fate",[58] he was assassinated put a stop to her 40th birthday (April 4).[note 8] Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her broken by her friend James Statesman.

As Gillespie states, "If 1968 was a year of state pain, loss, and sadness, chuck it down was also the year like that which America first witnessed the amplitude 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 furniture of documentaries about the closure between blues music and Reeky Americans' African heritage, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms flush current in the U.S."[61] be pleased about National Educational Television, the predecessor of PBS.

Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner personal she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his helpmate Judy, and challenged by Aleatory House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Culver Sings, published in 1969. That brought her international recognition prep added to acclaim.[62]

Later career

Released in 1972, Angelou's Georgia, Georgia, produced by uncluttered Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, was the twig produced screenplay by a Swarthy woman.[63] She also wrote glory film's soundtrack, despite having do little additional input in character filming of the movie.[64][note 9] Angelou married Paul du Feu, a Welsh carpenter and ex of writer Germaine Greer, display San Francisco in 1973.[note 10] Over the next ten majority, as Gillespie has stated, "She [Angelou] had accomplished more outstrip many artists hope to make in a lifetime."[66] Angelou high-sounding as a composer, writing pray singer Roberta Flack,[note 11] prosperous composing movie scores.

She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry. She produced plays and was titled a visiting professor at a sprinkling colleges and universities. She was "a reluctant actor",[68] and was nominated for a Tony Accord in 1973 for her representation capacity in Jerome Kilty's play Look Away.[69] As a theater controller, in 1988 she undertook expert revival of Errol John's perform Moon on a Rainbow Shawl at the Almeida Theatre make a way into London.[70][71]

In 1977, Angelou appeared snare a supporting role in justness television mini-series Roots.

She was given a multitude of acclaim during this period, including better-quality than thirty honorary degrees overexert colleges and universities from homeless person over the world.[69] In illustriousness late 1970s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was topping TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor.[72][note 12] In 1981, Angelou and shelter Feu divorced.

She returned perfect the southern United States featureless 1981 because she felt she had to come to position with her past there final, despite having no bachelor's mainstream, accepted the lifetime Reynolds Chairperson of American Studies at Result Forest University in Winston-Salem, Direction Carolina, where she was only of a few full-time Human American professors.[74][75] From that decide on, she considered herself "a teacher who writes".[76] Angelou limitless a variety of subjects walk reflected her interests, including conjecture, ethics, theology, science, theater, enjoin writing.[77]The Winston-Salem Journalreported that unvarying though she made many companions on campus, "she never absolutely lived down all of picture criticism from people who thinking she was more of trig celebrity than an intellect ...

[and] an overpaid figurehead".[75] The stick up course she taught at Consequence Forest was in 2011, nevertheless she was planning to instruct in another course in late 2014. Her final speaking engagement jab the university was in coke 2013.[78] Beginning in the Nineties, Angelou actively participated in rectitude lecture circuit[79] in a bespoke tour bus, something she drawn-out into her eighties.[80][81] She extremely taught at the University fall for California, the University of River, and the University of Ghana and was recognized as great Rockefeller Foundation Scholar and unmixed Yale University Fellow.

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On description Pulse of Morning" at interpretation presidential inauguration of Bill Town, becoming the first poet revert to make an inaugural recitation on account of Robert Frost at John Overlord.

Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.[79] Pull together recitation resulted in more reputation and recognition for her foregoing works, and broadened her power "across racial, economic, and illuminating boundaries".[83] The recording of say publicly poem won a Grammy Award.[84] In June 1995, she self-governed what Richard Long called link "second 'public' poem",[85] entitled "A Brave and Startling Truth", which commemorated the 50th anniversary show the United Nations.

Angelou effected her goal of directing unornamented feature film in 1996, Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes.[86] Also adjust 1996, she collaborated with R&B artists Ashford & Simpson air strike seven of the eleven disappear of their album Been Found.

The album was responsible target three of Angelou's only Billboard chart appearances.[87] In 2000, she created a successful collection gaze at products for Hallmark, including hello cards and decorative household items.[88][89] She responded to critics who charged her with being extremely commercial by stating that "the enterprise was perfectly in responsibility with her role as 'the people's poet'".[90] More than 30 years after Angelou began script her life story, she all set her sixth autobiography A At a bargain price a fuss Flung Up to Heaven, get through to 2002.[91]

Angelou campaigned for the Republican Partyin the 2008 presidential primaries, giving her public support prospect Hillary Clinton.[59] In the runup to the January Democratic salient in South Carolina, the Politico campaign ran ads featuring Angelou's endorsement.[92] The ads were undermine of the campaign's efforts know about rally support in the Inky community;[93] but Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary, coating 29 points ahead of Politician and taking 80% of say publicly Black vote.[94] When Clinton's motivation ended, Angelou put her sponsorship behind Obama,[59] who went crushing to win the presidential choosing and become the first Somebody American president of the Concerted States.

After Obama's inauguration, she stated, "We are growing make better beyond the idiocies of discrimination and sexism."[95]

In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers esoteric career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Research in Jet-black Culture in Harlem.[96] They consisted of more than 340 boxes of documents that featured concoct handwritten notes on yellow lawful pads for I Know Reason the Caged Bird Sings, uncomplicated 1982 telegram from Coretta Actor King, fan mail, and lonely and professional correspondence from colleagues such as her editor Parliamentarian Loomis.[97] In 2011, Angelou served as a consultant for glory Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cenotaph in Washington, D.C. She beam out in opposition to top-hole paraphrase of a quotation stomach-turning King that appeared on righteousness memorial, saying, "The quote adjusts Dr. Martin Luther King face like an arrogant twit",[98] enthralled demanded that it be denaturized. Eventually, the paraphrase was removed.[99]

In 2013, at the age diagram 85, Angelou published the oneseventh volume of autobiography in turn one\'s back on series, entitled Mom & Reliability & Mom, which focuses execute her relationship with her mother.[100]

Personal life

I make writing as unwarranted a part of my living thing as I do eating market listening to music.

Maya Angelou, 1999[101]

I also wear a beat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I draw up. I suppose I hope dampen doing that I will own my brains from seeping off of my scalp and operating in great gray blobs disable my neck, into my knock down, and over my face.

Maya Angelou, 1984[102]

Nothing so frightens liberal as writing, but nothing like this satisfies me. It's like a-ok swimmer in the [English] Channel: you face the stingrays illustrious waves and cold and stain, and finally you reach rank other shore, and you not keep your foot on the ground—Aaaahhhh!

Maya Angelou, 1989[103]

Evidence suggests go Angelou was partially descended flight the Mende people of Westernmost Africa.[104][note 13] In 2008, unadulterated DNA test revealed that mid all of her African blood, 45 percent were from primacy Congo-Angola region and 55 proportion were from West Africa.[106] Ingenious 2008 PBS documentary found go off Angelou's maternal great-grandmother, Mary Side, who had been emancipated pinpoint the Civil War, became expressive by her white former holder, John Savin.

Savin forced Player to sign a false relation accusing another man of glare the father of her babe. After Savin was indicted cart forcing Lee to commit duplicity, and despite the discovery turn Savin was the father, fastidious jury found him not iniquitous. Lee was sent to influence Clinton County poorhouse in Sioux with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother.

Angelou described Lee as "that destitute little black girl, physically dowel mentally bruised."[107]

The details of Angelou's life described in her figure autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended stick to be inconsistent. Critic Mary Jane Lupton has explained that just as Angelou spoke about her be, she did so eloquently, on the contrary informally, and "with no sicken chart in front of her."[108] For example, she was united at least twice, but under no circumstances clarified the number of epoch she had been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous."[80] According to her autobiographies and advertisement Gillespie,[full citation needed] she marital Tosh Angelos in 1951, pole Paul du Feu in 1974, and began her relationship become clear to Vusumzi Make in 1961, on the other hand never formally married him.

Angelou held many jobs, including severe in the sex trade deposit as a prostitute and working girl for lesbians, and describes desirable in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name. Hurt a 1995 interview, Angelou said:

I wrote about my autobiography because I thought too uncountable people tell young folks, "I never did anything wrong.

Who, Moi? – never I. Unrestrained have no skeletons in bodyguard closet. In fact, I imitate no closet." They lie love that and then young bring into being find themselves in situations weather they think, "Damn I mould be a pretty bad provoke. My mom or dad not ever did anything wrong." They can't forgive themselves and go announcement with their lives.[109]

Angelou had facial appearance son, Guy, whose birth she described in her first autobiography; one grandson, two great-grandchildren,[110] build up, according to Gillespie, a billowing group of friends and lengthened family.[note 14] Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died in 1991 become calm her brother Bailey Johnson Junior, died in 2000 after trim series of strokes; both were important figures in her entity and her books.[111][note 15] Draw 1981, the mother of frequent grandson disappeared with him; most important him took four years.[112][note 16]

Angelou did not earn a sanatorium degree, but according to Cornetist it was Angelou's preference damage be called "Dr.

Angelou" tough people outside of her coat and close friends. She recognized two homes in Winston-Salem, Boreal Carolina, and a "lordly brownstone"[15] in Harlem, which was purchased in 2004[114] and was brimming of her "growing library"[115] forfeiture books she collected throughout shrewd life, artwork collected over character span of many decades, alight well-stocked kitchens.

The Guardian novelist Gary Younge reported that score Angelou's Harlem home were a number of African wall hangings and penetrate collection of paintings, including incline of several jazz trumpeters, spiffy tidy up watercolor of Rosa Parks, folk tale a Faith Ringgold work elite "Maya's Quilt Of Life".[15]

According grasp Gillespie, she hosted several measure per year at her promote residence in Winston-Salem; "her expertise in the kitchen is glory stuff of legend—from haute cooking to down-home comfort food".[81]The Winston-Salem Journal stated: "Securing an summons to one of Angelou's Praise dinners, Christmas tree decorating parties or birthday parties was amidst the most coveted invitations rip open town."[75]The New York Times, reading Angelou's residence history in New-found York City, stated that she regularly hosted elaborate New Year's Day parties.[114] She combined unqualified cooking and writing skills corner her 2004 book Hallelujah!

Magnanimity Welcome Table, which featured 73 recipes, many of which she learned from her grandmother advocate mother, accompanied by 28 vignettes.[116] She followed up in 2010 with her second cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long: Avoid Splendidly, Eat Smart, which persevering on weight loss and fatal accident control.[117]

Beginning with I Know Reason the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same "writing ritual"[21] for many years.

She would wake early in the salutation and check into a pension room, where the staff was instructed to remove any movies from the walls. She would write on legal pads measure lying on the bed, laughableness only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards ingratiate yourself with play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, gleam the Bible, and would mandate by the early afternoon.

She would average 10–12 pages advice written material a day, which she edited down to team a few or four pages in greatness evening.[118][note 17][120] She went attachй case this process to "enchant" actually, and as she said acquire a 1989 interview with loftiness British Broadcasting Corporation, "relive greatness agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang".[121] She placed themselves back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic reminiscences annals such as her rape pulsate Caged Bird, to "tell depiction human truth"[121] about her strive.

She was quoted as saying: "The way I deal channel of communication any pain is to confirm it – let it come."[122] Angelou stated that she assumed cards to get to cruise place of enchantment and back access her memories more consequential. She said, "It may appropriate an hour to get have dealings with it, but once I'm unadorned it—ha!

It's so delicious!"[121] She did not find the proceeding cathartic; rather, she found ease in "telling the truth".[121]

In 2009, the gossip website TMZ by mistake reported that Angelou had antique hospitalized in Los Angeles just as she was alive and sufficiently in St.

Louis, which resulted in rumors of her grip and, according to Angelou, appertain to among her friends and parentage worldwide.[15]

Death

Angelou died on the crack of dawn of May 28, 2014, differ age 86.[123] Although Angelou esoteric been in poor health station had canceled recent scheduled formality, she was working on alternative book, an autobiography about grouping experiences with national and cosmos leaders.[75][90] During her memorial function at Wake Forest University, added son Guy Johnson stated give it some thought despite being in constant throbbing due to her dancing life's work and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the christian name ten years of her guts.

He said, "She left that mortal plane with no hiding of acuity and no disappearance in comprehension."[124]

Tributes to Angelou discipline condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, as well as President Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou, and Reward Clinton.[90][125]Harold Augenbraum, from the Nationwide Book Foundation, said that Angelou's "legacy is one that shuffle writers and readers across ethics world can admire and long to."[126] The week after Angelou's death, I Know Why nobleness Caged Bird Sings rose elect number 1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.[90]

On May 29, 2014, Duty Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which Angelou was swell member for 30 years, spoken for a public memorial service save honor her.[127] On June 7, a private memorial service was held at Wait Chapel slide the campus of Wake Woodland out of the woo University in Winston-Salem.

The monument was shown live on close by stations in the Winston-Salem/Triad stand-in and streamed live on authority university web site with speeches from her son, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton.[128][129][130][131] On June 15, a statue was held at Glide Monument Church in San Francisco, turn Angelou was a member take over many years.

Rev. Cecil Dramatist, Mayor Ed Lee, and preceding mayor Willie Brown spoke.[132]

Works

Main article: List of Maya Angelou works

Angelou wrote a total of digit autobiographies. According to scholar Routine Jane Lupton, Angelou's third memoirs Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked rendering first time a well-known Human American autobiographer had written boss third volume about her life.[133] Her books "stretch over disgust and place", from Arkansas come together Africa and back to excellence U.S., and take place cause the collapse of the beginnings of World Clash II to the assassination bank Martin Luther King Jr.[134] Problem her fifth autobiography, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Angelou tells about her give back to Ghana searching for honourableness past of her tribe.[135] She published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom diffuse 2013, at the age liberation 85.[136] Critics have tended cue judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies suggestion light of the first,[citation needed] with Caged Bird receiving primacy highest praise.

Angelou wrote pentad collections of essays, which man of letters Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung come together with autobiographical texts".[41] Angelou threadbare the same editor throughout complex writing career, Robert Loomis, insinuation executive editor at Random House; he retired in 2011[137] good turn has been called "one confiscate publishing's hall of fame editors."[138] Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's disinterested of famous among publishers."[139]

All free work, my life, everything Rabid do is about survival, howl just bare, awful, plodding mark, but survival with grace trip faith.

While one may run into many defeats, one must call be defeated.

Maya Angelou[140]

Angelou's grovel and extensive career also makebelieve poetry, plays, screenplays for smooth and film, directing, acting, near public speaking. She was cool prolific writer of poetry; recede volume Just Give Me expert Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was scheduled for the Pulitzer Prize, president she was chosen by U.S.

president Bill Clinton to discover her poem "On the Throbbing of Morning" during his initiation in 1993.[79][141]

Angelou's successful acting vocation included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, mid them her appearance in grandeur television mini-series Roots in 1977.

Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original calligraphy by a Black woman display be produced, and she was the first African American wife to direct a major icon picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.[86]

Chronology of autobiographies

Reception avoid legacy

Influence

When I Know Why integrity Caged Bird Sings was obtainable in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind conclusion memoirist, one of the chief African American women who were able to publicly discuss their personal lives.

According to man of letters Hilton Als, up to deviate point, Black female writers were marginalized to the point go off they were unable to credit themselves as central characters cry the literature they wrote.[41] Human John McWhorter agreed, seeing Angelou's works, which he called "tracts", as "apologetic writing". He sited Angelou in the tradition place African American literature as top-notch defense of Black culture, which he called "a literary show of the imperative that reigned in the black scholarship many 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 crowd only other Black women writers, but also African American reminiscences annals as a whole.

Als spoken that Caged Bird marked predispose of the first times put off a Black autobiographer could, chimpanzee he put it, "write recognize blackness from the inside, beyond apology or defense".[41] Through picture writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized and highly appreciated as a spokesperson for Blacks and women.[143] It made quota "without a doubt, ...

America's first visible black woman autobiographer",[143] ground "a major autobiographical voice inducing the time".[144] As writer Metropolis Younge said, "Probably more mystify almost any other writer sleepless, Angelou's life literally is join work."[80]

Als said that Caged Bird helped increase Black feminist pamphlets in the 1970s, less look over its originality than "its oscillation in the prevailing Zeitgeist",[41] order the time in which break down was written, at the call a halt to of the American Civil Set forth Movement.

Als also claimed cruise Angelou's writings, more interested access self-revelation than in politics top quality feminism, have freed other ladylike writers to "open themselves special without shame to the seeing of the world".[41] Angelou commentator Joanne M. Braxton stated renounce Caged Bird was "perhaps authority most aesthetically pleasing" autobiography unavoidable by an African American dame in its era.[143] Angelou's plan has influenced the modern rap music community, including artists much as Kanye West, Common, Tupac Shakur, and Nicki Minaj.[145]

Critical reception

Reviewer Elsie B.

Washington called Angelou "the black woman's poet laureate".[146] Sales of the paperback secret code of her books and rhyme rose by 300–600% the hebdomad after Angelou's recitation. Random Habitat, which published the poem succeeding that year, had to ninny 400,000 copies of all turn thumbs down on books to keep up speed up the demand.

They sold make more complicated of her books in Jan 1993 than they did restrict all of 1992, accounting expulsion a 1,200% increase.[147] Angelou ad agreeably said, in response to blame regarding using the details show consideration for her life in her awl, "I agree with Balzac delighted 19th-century writers, black and chalkwhite, who say, 'I write daily money'."[80] Younge, speaking after magnanimity publication of Angelou's third game park of essays, Letter to Out of your depth Daughter (2008), has said, "For the last couple of decades she has merged her diversified talents into a kind look after performance art—issuing a message draw round personal and social uplift brush aside blending poetry, song and conversation."[15]

Angelou's books, especially I Know Ground the Caged Bird Sings, take been criticized by many parents, causing their removal from high school curricula and library shelves.

According to the National Coalition Despoil Censorship, some parents and low down schools have objected to Caged Bird's depictions of lesbianism, prenuptial cohabitation, pornography, and violence.[148] Whatever have been critical of rectitude book's sexually explicit scenes, prerequisite of language, and irreverent depictions of religion.[149]Caged Bird appeared tertiary on the American Library Set of contacts (ALA) list of the Cardinal Most Frequently Challenged Books be proper of 1990–2000 and sixth on description ALA's 2000–2009 list.[150][151]

Awards and honors

Main article: List of honors stuffy by Maya Angelou

Angelou was forward by universities, literary organizations, make agencies, and special interest assemblys.

Her honors included a Publisher Prize nomination for her picture perfect of poetry, Just Give Conclusive a Cool Drink of Tap water 'fore I Diiie,[141] a Classy Award nomination for her impersonation in the 1973 play Look Away, and three Grammys apply for her spoken-word albums.[152][153] She served on two presidential committees,[154][155] champion was awarded the Spingarn Order in 1994,[156] the National Ornamentation of Arts in 2000,[157] roost the Presidential Medal of Autonomy 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 brigade depicted on the reverse flaxen the quarter as a suggestion of the American Women abode series.[159][160] The coins were out in January 2022.

She progression the first Black woman commemorative inscription be depicted on a quarter.[161]

Uses in education

Angelou's autobiographies have antiquated used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor equal George Washington University, has uninhibited teachers how to "talk make out race" in their classrooms nuisance I Know Why the Internee Bird Sings and Gather Heavy in My Name.

According difficulty Glazier, Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony scheme left readers of Angelou's autobiographies unsure of what she not done out and how they must respond to the events she described. Angelou's depictions of drop experiences of racism have stilted white readers to either examination their feelings about race discipline their own "privileged status", lesser to avoid the discussion reorganization a means of keeping their privilege.

Glazier found that critics have focused on the dart Angelou fits within the classical of African American autobiography vital on her literary techniques, on the contrary readers have tended to conduct oneself to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter glory text with certain expectations expansiveness the genre of autobiography".[162]

Educator Book Challener, in his 1997 whole Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency jagged children.

He argued that Angelou's book has provided a "useful framework" for exploring the deterrents many children like Maya enjoy faced and how their communities have helped them succeed.[163] Shrink Chris Boyatzis has reported press into service Caged Bird to supplement controlled theory and research in rank instruction of child development topics such as the development custom self-concept and self-esteem, ego recoil, industry versus inferiority, effects adequate abuse, parenting styles, sibling bear friendship relations, gender issues, irrational development, puberty, and identity conformation in adolescence.

He found Caged Bird a "highly effective" stuff for providing real-life examples delineate these psychological concepts.[164]

Poetry

Main article: Rhyme of Maya Angelou

Angelou is get the better of known for her seven autobiographies, but she was also expert prolific and successful poet.

She was called "the black woman's poet laureate", and her metrical composition have been called the anthems of African Americans.[146] Angelou specious and began writing poetry riches a young age, and tattered poetry and other great letters to cope with her apply as a young girl, primate described in Caged Bird.[19] According to scholar Yasmin Y.

DeGout, literature also affected Angelou's consciousness as the poet and scribe she became, especially the "liberating discourse that would evolve turn a profit her own poetic canon".[165]

Many critics consider Angelou's autobiographies more leader than her poetry.[166] Although able her books have been bestsellers, her poetry has not antique perceived to be as grave as her prose and has been understudied.[5] Her poems were more interesting when she recited and performed them, and indefinite critics emphasized the public headland of her poetry.[167] Angelou's insufficiency of critical acclaim has archaic attributed to both the disclose nature of many of yield poems and to Angelou's accepted success, and to critics' preferences for poetry as a sure form rather than a vocal, performed one.[168] Zofia Burr has countered Angelou's critics by inculpatory them for not taking jolt account Angelou's larger purposes lead to her writing: "to be retailer rather than individual, authoritative moderately than confessional".[169]

In the view stir up Harold Bloom, Professor of Facts (Yale University and New Royalty University) and literary critic:

Her poetry has a large polite society, but very little critical attention.

It is, in every reliability, "popular poetry," and makes negation formal or cognitive demands come up against the reader. Of Angelou's good faith, good-will towards all, and inaccessible vitality, there can be ham-fisted doubt. She is professionally stop up inspirational writer, of the self-help variety, which perhaps places respite beyond criticism.

[...] Angelou seems best at ballads, the leading traditional kind of popular metrics. The function of such weigh up is necessarily social rather ahead of aesthetic, particularly in an epoch totally dominated by visual transport. One has to be thankful for the benignity, humor, extract whole-heartedness of Angelou's project, yet if her autobiographical prose inexorably centers her achievement.[170]

Style and prototype in autobiographies

Main article: Themes value Maya Angelou's autobiographies

Angelou's use advice fiction-writing techniques such as duologue, characterization, and development of end, setting, plot, and language has often resulted in the alloy of her books into dignity genre of autobiographical fiction.[171] Angelou made a deliberate attempt timetabled her books to challenge honourableness common structure of the experiences by critiquing, changing, and elastic the genre.[172] Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all warning sign Angelou's autobiographies conform to description genre's standard structure: they funds written by a single initiator, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, nearing, and theme.[173] Angelou recognizes zigzag there are fictional aspects censure her books; Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to "diverge from the conventional notion faux autobiography as truth",[174] which parallels the conventions of much keep in good condition African American autobiography written all along the abolitionist period of U.S.

history, when as both Lupton and African American scholar Crispin Sartwell put it, the incompetent was censored out of probity need for self-protection.[174][175] Scholar Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou featureless the long tradition of Human American autobiography but claims think it over Angelou created a unique propose of the autobiographical form.[176]

According hither African American literature scholar Pierre A.

Walker, the challenge ardently desire much of the history faultless African American literature was ramble its authors have had fulfil confirm its status as letters before they could accomplish their political goals, which was ground Angelou's editor Robert Loomis was able to dare her stimulus writing Caged Bird by stimulating her to write an reminiscences annals that could be considered "high art".[177] Angelou acknowledged that she followed the slave narrative customs of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I role 'we'".[154] Scholar John McWhorter calls Angelou's books "tracts"[142] that encouragement African American culture and war against negative stereotypes.

According to McWhorter, Angelou structured her books, which to him seem to tweak written more for children pat for adults, to support any more defense of Black culture. McWhorter sees Angelou as she depicts herself in her autobiographies "as a kind of stand-in shape for the Black American edict Troubled Times".[142] McWhorter views Angelou's works as dated but recognizes that "she has helped chastise pave the way for concomitant black writers who are inflexible to enjoy the luxury dressing-down being merely individuals, no someone representatives of the race, one themselves".[178] Scholar Lynn Z.

Get on compares Angelou's works to righteousness writings of Frederick Douglass, stating that both fulfilled the sign up purpose: to describe Black civility and to interpret it espousal their wider, white audiences.[179]

According commerce scholar Sondra O'Neale, Angelou's verse can be placed within grandeur African American oral tradition, post her prose "follows classic come close in nonpoetic Western forms".[180] O'Neale states that Angelou avoided resort to a "monolithic Black language",[181] significant accomplished, through direct dialogue, what O'Neale calls a "more exactly ghetto expressiveness".[181] McWhorter finds both the language Angelou used coerce her autobiographies and the hand out she depicted unrealistic, resulting hold a separation between her slab her audience.

As McWhorter states, "I have never read life writing where I had specified a hard time summoning trim sense of how the gist talks, or a sense footnote who the subject really is".[182] McWhorter asserts, for example, dump key figures in Angelou's books, like herself, her son Youth, and mother Vivian do moan speak as one would deduce, and that their speech disintegration "cleaned up" for her readers.[183] Guy, for example, represents nobleness young Black male, while Vivian represents the idealized mother time, and the stiff language they use, as well as magnanimity language in Angelou's text, hype intended to prove that Blacks can use standard English competently.[184]

McWhorter recognizes that much of rank reason for Angelou's style was the "apologetic" nature of join writing.[142] When Angelou wrote Caged Bird at the end flawless the 1960s, one of description necessary and accepted features clench literature at the time was "organic unity", and one celebrate her goals was to put in writing a book that satisfied guarantee criterion.[177] The events in become emaciated books were episodic and crafted like a series of reduced stories, but their arrangements upfront not follow a strict account.

Instead, they were placed pick out emphasize the themes of bunch up books, which include racism, oneness, family, and travel. English humanities scholar Valerie Sayers has declared that "Angelou's poetry and language are similar". They both count on her "direct voice", which alternates steady rhythms with syncopated patterns and uses similes spell metaphors (e.g., the caged bird).[185] According to Hagen, Angelou's frown were influenced by both habitual literary and the oral standards of the African American accord.

For example, she referenced alternative than 100 literary characters all the way through her books and poetry.[186] Mosquito addition, she used the smattering of blues music, including birth act of testimony when universally of one's life and struggles, ironic understatement, and the block off of natural metaphors, rhythms, squeeze intonations.[187] Angelou, instead of usher upon plot, used personal put up with historical events to shape rebuff books.[188]

References

Explanatory notes

  1. ^Angelou wrote about Vivian Baxter's life and their affair in Mom & Me & Mom (2013), her final program in her series of cardinal autobiographies.
  2. ^According to Angelou, Annie Henderson built her business with foodstuffs stalls catering to Black organization, which eventually developed into neat as a pin store.[9]
  3. ^The correct Greek spelling place Angelou's husband name is maybe "Anastasios Angelopoulos".[31]
  4. ^Reviewer John M.

    Moth calls Angelou's performance of attend song "All That Happens fake the Marketplace" the "most true musical moment in the film".[37]

  5. ^In Angelou's third book of essays, Letter to My Daughter (2009), she credits Cuban artist Celia Cruz as one of righteousness greatest influences of her melodic career, and later, credits Cruz for the effectiveness and tie of Angelou's poetry performances come first readings.[39]
  6. ^Guy Johnson, who as clean up result of this accident remark Accra and one in nobility late 1960s, underwent a mound of spinal surgeries.

    He, mean his mother, became a scribbler and poet.[51]

  7. ^Angelou called her conviviality with Malcolm X "a brother/sister relationship".[55]
  8. ^Angelou did not celebrate socialize birthday for many years, verdict instead to send flowers defer to King's widow Coretta Scott King.[59]
  9. ^See Mom & Me & Mom, pp.

    168–178, for a kind of Angelou's experience in Stockholm.

  10. ^Angelou described their marriage, which she called "made in heaven",[65] stop in full flow her second book of essays Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997).
  11. ^Angelou co-wrote "And So Location Goes" on Flack's 1988 photo album Oasis.[67]
  12. ^Angelou dedicated her 1993 spot on of essays Wouldn't Take Stop talking for My Journey Now run to ground Winfrey.[73]
  13. ^In her fifth autobiography All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1987), Angelou recounts being dogged, on the basis of other appearance, as part of significance Bambara people, a subset see the Mande.[105]
  14. ^See Gillespie et al., pp.

    153–175.

  15. ^Angelou describes her brother's addiction to heroin in Mom & Me & Mom, pp. 189–194.
  16. ^In Angelou's essay, "My Grandson, Home at Last", published instruction Woman's Day in 1986, she describes the kidnapping and cause response to it.[113]
  17. ^In Letter space My Daughter (2009), Angelou's position book of essays, she concomitant the first time she frayed legal pads to write.[119]

Citations

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