I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. The other volumes in her series of seven autobiographies are judged and compared to "Caged Bird." It became a bestseller immediately after it was published. Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book "liberates the reader into life" and called it "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death". According to Angelou's biographers, "Readers, especially women, and in particular Black women, took the book to heart".