I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Author(s): Maya Angelou

Biography & Memoir | Biography

Maya Angelou's six volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother's lover. 'I write about being a Black American woman, however, I am always talking about what it's like to be a human being. This is how we are, what makes us laugh, and this is how we fall and how we somehow, amazingly, stand up again' --Maya Angelou


Product Information

One of America's most important classics, the first and best loved volume of Maya Angelou's bestselling seven-volume autobiography.

'I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself more moved' --James Baldwin

Maya Angelou has been waitress, singer, actress, dancer, activist, filmmaker, writer and mother. As well as her autobiography she has written several volumes of poetry. She now has a life-time appointment as Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

General Fields

  • : 9780860685111
  • : Little Brown
  • : Virago
  • : December 1995
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Maya Angelou
  • : Paperback
  • : en
  • : 809
  • : 320
  • : BG