page_title: Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Maya Angelou visits York College Feb 2013
context_page_description: The themes encompassed in African-American writer Maya Angelou's seven autobiographies include racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The rest of the books in her series are Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, and Mom & Me & Mom.
  Beginning with Caged Bird and ending with her final autobiography, Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage, as described in the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy". Angelou's autobiographies can be placed in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Their unity underscores one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. According to scholar Pierre A. Walker, all of Angelou's books describe "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". In the course of her autobiographies, her views about Black-white relationships changed and she learned to accept different points of view.
context_section_description: Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Maya Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator.  In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated on April 4, which also happened to be her birthday.
  Angelou was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968.  The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day she called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright. According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology", and reported that Loomis tricked her into it by daring her: "It's just as well", he said, "because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible".  Angelou was unable to resist a challenge, and she began writing Caged Bird.
  Angelou did not write Caged Bird with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies, however critics have "judged the subsequent autobiographies in light of the first", with Caged Bird generally receiving the highest praise. Angelou's autobiographies have a distinct style, and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S.  They take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's autobiographies have been characterized as autobiographical fiction, but Lupton disagrees, stating that they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.
  Angelou's use of themes, especially that of racism, connects all seven autobiographies.  One of her goals, beginning with Caged Bird, was to incorporate "organic unity" into them, and the events she described were episodic, crafted like a series of short stories, and were placed to emphasize the themes of her books.  Through the writing of her life stories in her autobiographies, Angelou became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women.  According to scholar Joanne Braxton, it made her "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".
  Beginning with Caged Bird, Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years, for most of her books and poetry. She would get up at five in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls.  She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon.  She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.  Lupton stated that this ritual indicated "a firmness of purpose and an inflexible use of time". Angelou went through this process to give herself time to turn the events of her life into art, and to "enchant" herself; 
caption: Maya Angelou, in 2013, at 85 years old.
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