![]() ![]() After thinking about it for some time, I chose this, the first volume in Angelou’s memoir series, and the one which is often considered to be the best. ![]() I also wanted to avoid titles that would most likely have been ghost-written. The June theme was an autobiography, a tricky category since enjoyment can often depend on your feelings about the author. I chose this book for my 2018 Facebook Reading Challenge. It is a sobering tale, and a testament to her immense ability, that someone with that kind of background could become such a great and important figure, well-known not just in the United States, but throughout the world. Her early life in Arkansas featured parental abandonment, overt racism, sexual abuse, discrimination and poverty. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is the first volume and covers her childhood and coming of age. In the late 1960s she was persuaded to begin writing an autobiography and she went on to publish it in seven volumes, the latest one appearing in 2013, just a year before her death. And yet, her start was a decidedly inauspicious one. Poet, author, civil rights activist, speaker, friend and advisor to figures of national and international importance, her career was, by any standards, glittering. When Maya Angelou died in 2014 at the age of 86, she was one of the towering figures of American culture and politics. ![]()
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