Maya Angelou

The name Maya Angelou began as a stage name, shaped from a childhood nickname and a former married surname, but it came to stand for one of the most widely read voices in American letters. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, she grew up across St. Louis, Stamps, Arkansas, and later California, moving through places that would become central to her writing. Over more than 50 years, she worked as a memoirist, essayist, poet, performer, and civil rights activist, publishing seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, along with work connected to plays, movies, and television.

Angelou’s best-known book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, appeared in 1969 and brought her international recognition. It told the story of her life up to age 17, and it set the pattern for a series of autobiographies centered on childhood and early adult experience. Her books returned again and again to racism, identity, family, and travel. They were widely used in schools and universities around the world, even as some U.S. libraries saw attempts to ban them. Critics have debated whether her most celebrated works should be called autobiographical fiction or autobiography, but Angelou herself pushed the form, changing and expanding what a life story could do.

The experiences behind that work were hard won. As a child, after her parents’ marriage ended, Angelou and her brother Bailey were sent alone by train to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother, Annie Henderson. At age eight, while living with her mother in St. Louis, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After he was convicted, jailed for only one day, and later murdered, Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing her voice had caused his death. During that silence, biographers note, she developed a strong memory, a love of books and literature, and a sharp ability to listen and observe.

A teacher and family friend, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, helped Angelou speak again by telling her she could not truly love poetry until she spoke it. Flowers introduced her to writers including Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Black women artists such as Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset. Later, in Oakland and San Francisco, Angelou attended the California Labor School during World War II and, at 16, became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Three weeks after completing school, at 17, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who later changed his name to Guy Johnson.

Before she became famous as a writer, Angelou took odd jobs, studied dance, performed modern dance with Alvin Ailey, and sang and danced to calypso music in San Francisco clubs, including The Purple Onion. She became active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Beginning in the 1990s, she made about 80 lecture appearances a year, continuing into her eighties. In 1993, she read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, the first poet to give an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost in 1961.

Angelou’s words still draw readers because they are plainspoken without being simple. She wrote and spoke from pain, discipline, memory, and public action, and she became respected as a spokesperson for African Americans and women. Her sentences often sound like counsel from someone who had watched closely and survived much: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” That blend of candor and expectation is why her voice continues to feel close at hand.