# data[].attributes.body
Maya Angelou’s work supports the idea of the American Dream by identifying her own perseverance and determination to achieve her own dream in spite of hardship. In addition, her work instilled hope for women and African Americans alike that were dealing with an oppressive American society. Although Maya Angelou achieved her dream through her own work she also attributes much of her success to the support her friends and family provided.

# data[].attributes.headline
Themes and Construction: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

# data[].attributes.subject
Themes and Construction: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

# data[].attributes.body
Maya Angelou uses themes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to illustrate her pursuit and achievement of the American Dream. “The best example of this is her persistence in becoming the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She has learned to outwit her tormentors, who include snobby whites, pretentious blacks, and most of the men she encounters along the difficult path of growing up”(EXPLORING Novels).  Thus through Angelou's own life experiences, she proves, with intelligence and hard work, the American Dream is achievable and alive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

For Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the American dream was somewhere over the bridge in the white part of town. Through her keen perception and her probing insight into her character Marguerite Johnson, she sees reality in all its beauty and ugliness. Eventually, Marguerite comes to terms with the fact that she is forever black and that she can succeed in a world filled with prejudice. The best example of this is her persistence in becoming the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She has learned to outwit her tormentors, who include snobby whites, pretentious blacks, and most of the men she encounters along the difficult path of growing up.

Along the way, Marguerite has many mentors to guide her in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings -her grandmother Annie Henderson, Mrs. Flowers, her motherVivian Baxter Johnson, and her high-school teacher, Miss Kirwin. All her guides are strong women who have preceded her and have survived the similar trials of youth that she is going through. Angelou's portrayal of black males is quite negative; most of the male characters in the book are the weak links in the chain toward her success. It thus becomes a feminist manifesto as well as the story of a shy and awkward black child who blossoms into an assured and self-confident young woman. Writes Angelou, "The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance."

Prejudice in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings takes different forms in the three places where the Johnson children spend their young years. In deep-South Arkansas, lynchings are the ultimate threat to black freedom. In St. Louis, their white-seeming octoroon (one-eighth black) Grandmother Baxter has special influence in the political arena of a seamy city. And their mother creates a buoyant and independent life through wit, talent, beauty, and determination. In San Francisco, Marguerite fights the establishment to go where no black has gone before.

Throughout I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou's strong belief in the power of education is evident. It is education, through reading, which brings Marguerite out of her silence after her rape, and education that allows her to create a better life for herself. In the author's own life, it was her love of knowledge and her intelligence that propelled her into multiple and exciting careers.

Although I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is often referred to as an autobiography, Angelou's use of novelistic techniques makes literary study of the work a valuable endeavor.

Throughout I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, we see people, places, and events through the imagination of Marguerite. While she often keeps her own counsel, she carries on a private dialogue with herself that is in turn poetic, humorous, sardonic, and tragic. Gifted with the ability to see through shams and affectations, she cuts through to the quick of her observations. She knows intuitively what is real and what is phony, and she processes all this information intellectually over her growing-up years and gradually forms a positive self-image. The shy, awkward child becomes the determined, talented young adult.

Key to communicating Marguerite's point of view is the narration of the novel. Angelou uses the first person "I" to tell events, giving the reader direct access to Marguerite's thoughts and concerns. Since the narration is limited to what Marguerite chooses to tell, the reader only gets to see events through her perceptions, and can only learn about other characters from Marguerite's descriptions and assumptions. This technique is common in autobiographical works, however, whose intention is to communicate the experiences of one individual.

The multiple settings in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in which Marguerite acquires her diversified knowledge of people and culture also highlight the difficulties she has in integrating her experiences into a single philosophy and identity. But by the end of the book the reader feels that she knows who she is and what she wants in life. What the reader can't know is how far she may stray from this identity before she discovers her true self.

Throughout the novel Marguerite alludes, or makes reference to, several songs and poems that come to have significance for her. When a group of white children torment Marguerite's grandmother, "Momma" begins singing a series of hymns as a way to turn aside their attempts to humiliate her. These songs, such as "Bread of Heaven," recall the spirituals sung by slaves as a means of dealing with the cruelties of slavery. During Marguerite's eighth-grade graduation, after a white speaker only speaks of limited roles for her and her fellow graduates, she feels bitterness and shame until the valedictorian leads the audience in "Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing," a poem by James Weldon Johnson. Made into a song and considered the "Negro national anthem," this poem helps Marguerite recall the difficult but triumphant struggle her ancestors have been through: "I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race." And of course, the title of the book makes reference to an inspirational poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar entitled "Sympathy," which recalls themes of freedom and self-discovery.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Themes and Construction: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the American dream was somewhere over the bridge in the white part of town. Through her keen perception and her probing insight into her character Marguerite Johnson, she sees reality in all its beauty and ugliness.

# data[].attributes.headline
Courageous: Maya Angelou's breakthrough memoir, published 50 years ago, launched a revolution in literature and social awareness

# data[].attributes.subject
Courageous: Maya Angelou's breakthrough memoir, published 50 years ago, launched a revolution in literature and social awareness

# data[].attributes.body
Maya Angelou's works have resonated with others and inspired many women to pursue their own American Dream. Angelou has inspired many because they resonated with her words. “Part of the reason the book continues to resonate is that it is, and always has been, more than a memoir of one woman's life. It has emerged as a blueprint for our times--presaging and encompassing everything from the #MeToo movement to self-care to the question of how to stand at the end of a tumultuous decade and look forward with hope. The book reminds every reader about the power in meeting brutal challenges head-on”(Smithsonian Institution). Therefore, Angelou's works have proved to many that the idea of the American Dream is real. Additionally, her works motivated many women and African Americans to pursue their American Dream."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
MAYA ANGELOU PUBLISHED the first of her seven memoirs not long after she distinguished herself as the star raconteur at a dinner party. "At the time, I was really only concerned with poetry, though I had written a television series," she would recall. James Baldwin, the novelist and activist, took her to the party, which was at the home of the cartoonist-writer Jules Feiffer and his then-wife, Judy. "We enjoyed each other immensely and sat up until 3 or 4 in the morning, drinking Scotch and telling tales," Angelou went on. "The next morning, Judy Feiffer called a friend of hers at Random House and said, 'You know the poet Maya Angelou? If you could get her to write a book ..."

That book became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday.

In the memoir, Angelou (born Marguerite Johnson) boldly told the heartbreaking truths of her childhood, including how she was raped at the age of 7 by her mother's boyfriend. She would later explain, "I stopped speaking for five years. In those five years, I read every book in the black school library. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say."

One of the women who helped Angelou find her voice was a teacher in Stamps, Arkansas, named Bertha Flowers. She was the kind of woman you rarely got to read about in American literature in the 1960s. Angelou's writing is cinematic; in Caged Bird, she transports the reader to another time:

Mrs. Bertha Flowers was the aristocrat of Black Stamps. She had the grace of control to appear warm in the coldest weather, and on the Arkansas summer days it seemed like she had a private breeze which swirled around, cooling her. She was thin without the taut look of wiry people and her printed voile dresses and flowered hats were as right for her as denim overalls for a farmer. She was our side's answer to the richest white woman in town.

It is all there--life, not just in the American South but this American life, period--waiting for you to take the ride, the heartbreaking and brave journey that is Marguerite Johnson's young life. Ahead of its publication, James Baldwin said Caged Bird "liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity. I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood, when the people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved. ... Her portrait is a biblical study in life in the midst of death."

THE CRITICAL AND PUBLIC reaction to the book was immediate and powerful. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for two years. It sold more than one million copies, has been translated into 17 languages and has never been out of print.

Over the last five decades, Marguerite Johnson has come to live in our imagination in a hallowed literary land where you can imagine she jumps double-dutch with Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time and Scout Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Part of the reason the book continues to resonate is that it is, and always has been, more than a memoir of one woman's life. It has emerged as a blueprint for our times--presaging and encompassing everything from the #MeToo movement to self-care to the question of how to stand at the end of a tumultuous decade and look forward with hope. The book reminds every reader about the power in meeting brutal challenges head-on. As Angelou wrote in Caged Bird, her mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson, never flinched in the face of adversity: "She was Vivian Baxter Johnson. Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst and unsurprised by anything in between."

It is the in-between of Angelou's life that is so engaging and surprising. She was the first black female cable-car conductor in San Francisco, a successful calypso singer, a star of the New York theater taking on groundbreaking roles in productions such as French playwright Jean Genet's The Blacks, a foreign service aide in Ghana, a magazine editor in Cairo and the first black woman to direct a major feature film in America. She was a friend and confidante of both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

In the end, it seemed there was nothing that Maya Angelou couldn't do. Caged Bird endures because it is a stunning reminder of all the possibility that lies on the other side of silence and suffering.

BY LINES Veronica Chambers is the award-winning author of Mama's Girl and a lifelong Angelou fan.

NO AMERICAN POET HAS PLAYED A BIGGER ROLE IN TV AND MOVIES THAN ANGELOU

ACTOR PORGYSBESS After dancing across Europe with a touring production of Porgy S Bess, Angelou appeared, uncredited, in the Otto Preminger film.

SCREENWRITER GEORGIA, GEORGIA The film, about a love affair between a black American singer and a white American deserter she meets in Sweden, was one of the first movies in America scripted by a black woman.

In this serialized adaptation of Alex Haley's best-selling novel, Angelou portrayed Nyo Boto, grandmother to Kunta Kinte; Angelou's role was a composite char acter drawn from several in the book.

ACTOR THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE Based on the nonfiction book by Alex Kotlowitz, the film follows two brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, as they grow up in the turbulent Chicago of the 1980s. Angelou plays their grandmother, and Oprah Winfrey, right, plays their mother.

DIRECTOR: DOWN IN THE DELTA

Angelou's directorial debut stars Alfre Woodard as a single mother struggling Chicago who goes to stay with family in Mississippi, where she and her children find a more joyful way of life

ACTOR "SESAME STREET" Angelou narrated and guest-starred in "Eimo Saves Christmas" and made several other appearances on the public TV show. "Sesame Street" mourned Angelou's death in 2014 by thanking her on Twitter for "all the hugs."

Caption: A first edition of the 1969 book. One copy from James Baldwin's personal library-inscribed "Joy! Maya Angelou"-is for sale online for $12,000.

Caption: Angelou often wrote in hotel rooms with a few essentials: a deck of cards, a crossword puzzle, a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a bottle of sherry.

Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MAYA ANGELOU PUBLISHED the first of her seven memoirs not long after she distinguished herself as the star raconteur at a dinner party. "At the time, I was really only concerned with poetry, though I had written a television series," she would recall.

# data[].attributes.body
Maya Angelou was able to achieve her dream, she was not alone and received physical and psychological aid from friends and family.  She “often returned to the loved ones who helped her triumph over the tragedies of her childhood and made her believe she could meet whatever challenge life threw in her path”(Smithsonian Institution). Although it takes one's own hard work and perseverance to achieve their dream, it is ok to receive aid from those around you and may be needed in your ultimate goal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

Turning 75 this month, Maya Angelou has led many lives. She is best known as a writer, for her numerous books of poetry and her six poignant memoirs, including the masterful 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In February, she won a Grammy for the recorded reading of her most recent memoir, A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Her works have earned her more than 30 honorary degrees as well as nominations for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She wrote "On the Pulse of Morning" for the 1993 swearing-in of President Bill Clinton, becoming only the second poet in U. S. history--Robert Frost was the first, for John F. Kennedy--invited to compose an inaugural poem.

Less well known are Angelou's other lives: as a singer; as a composer; as a dancer in Porgy and Bess; as an actor in the Obie-winning play The Blacks and in films such as Calypso Heat Wave and How to Make an American Quilt; as a civil rights worker with Martin Luther King, Jr.; as a journalist in Egypt and Ghana; as a writer for television and Hollywood; as director of the 1998 film Down in the Delta. Angelou is the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at North Carolina's Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. She is constantly on the lecture circuit and a regular guest on talk shows; she recently created a line of greeting cards for Hallmark. And there is little sign of her slowing down.

But when we met recently in her art-filled home in Winston-Salem, it was her family, not her varied career, that she most wanted to discuss. Our conversation often returned to the loved ones who helped her triumph over the tragedies of her childhood and made her believe she could meet whatever challenge life threw in her path.

Her grandmother Annie Henderson was one of the most important, a pious woman who ran a general store in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou lived most of her childhood with her grandmother, whom she called "Momma." Angelou's sometimes- absentee mother, Vivian Baxter, had a steel will and several careers of her own. She was an inadvertent player in an early, formative trauma in Angelou's life. When Angelou was 8 and briefly living with Baxter in St. Louis, her mother's boyfriend raped Angelou. The man was arrested, convicted and released; soon after, he was found beaten to death. Believing she had caused the killing because she had told of the rape, Angelou refused to speak for several years; only her beloved older brother, Bailey, could coax her to talk. He remained a source of support throughout her life until his death more than a year ago. And there is Angelou's son, Guy Johnson, 57, author of Echoes of a Distant Summer and one other novel. He is, she says, her "monument in the world."

MOORE: You've said that society's view of the black woman is such a threat to her well-being that she will die daily unless she determines how she sees herself. How do you see yourself?

ANGELOU: I just received a letter yesterday from the University of Milan. A person is doing a doctoral dissertation on my work. It's called Sapienza, which means wisdom. I'm considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I've never been bored in my life.

MOORE: You have never been bored? How is that possible?

ANGELOU: Oh God, if I were bored, now that would interest me. I'd think, my God, how did that happen and what's going on? I'd be caught up in it. Are you kidding? Bored?

I realized when I was about 20 that I would die. It frightened me so. I mean, I had heard about it, had been told and all that, but that I...? [She points at herself and raises her brows as if in disbelief.] It so terrified me that I double-locked the doors; I made certain that the windows were double-locked--trying to keep death out--and finally I admitted that there was nothing I could do about it. Once I really came to that conclusion, I started enjoying life, and I enjoy it very much.

Another occurrence took place at about the same time--maybe about a year later--and the two occurrences liberated me forever.

I had two jobs. I was raising my son. We had a tiny little place to live. My mother had a 14-room house and someone to look after things. She owned a hotel, lots of diamonds. I wouldn't accept anything from her. But once a month she'd cook for me. And I would go to her house and she'd be dressed beautifully.

One day after we'd had lunch, she had to go somewhere. She put on silver-fox furs--this was when the head of one fox would seem to bite into the head of the other--and she would wear them with the tails in front; she would turn it around with the furs arching back. We were halfway down the hill and she said, "Baby"--and she was small; she was 5-feet-4 1/2 and I'm 6 foot--"You know something? I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met." We stopped. I looked down at this pretty little woman made up so perfectly, diamonds in her ears. She said, "Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother and you--you are the greatest." It still brings me to te--. [Her eyes tear up.]

We walked down to the bottom of the hill. She crossed the street to the right to get into her car. I continued across the street and waited for the streetcar. And I got onto the streetcar and I walked to the back. I shall never forget it. I remember the wooden planks of the streetcar. The way the light came through the window. And I thought, suppose she's right? She's very intelligent, and she's too mean to lie. Suppose I really am somebody?

Those two incidents liberated me to think large thoughts, whether I could comprehend them or not [she laughs], but to think....

MOORE: One of your large thoughts must have been about planning to have a diverse life and career. How do you move so easily from one thing to another?

ANGELOU: I have a theory that nobody understands talent any more than we understand electricity. So I think we've done a real disservice to young people by telling them, "Oh, you be careful. You'll be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none." It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I think you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a mistress-of-all-trades. If you study it, and you put reasonable intelligence and reasonable energy, reasonable electricity to it, you can do that. You may not become Max Roach on the drums. But you can learn the drums. I've long felt that way about things. If I'm asked, "Can you do this?" I think, if I don't do it, it'll be ten years before another black woman is asked to do it. And I say, yes, yes, when do you want it?

My mom, you know, was a seaman. At one point, I was in Los Angeles. I called her in San Francisco and said, I want to see you, I'm going to New York and I don't know when I'll be back, so let's meet mid-state. She said, "Oh, baby, I wanted to see you, too, because I'm going to sea." I said, going to see what? She said, "I'm going to become a seaman." I said, Mother, really, come on. She said, "No, they told me they wouldn't let women in their union. I told them, `You wanna bet?' I put my foot in that door up to my hip so women of every color will get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea." She retired in 1980, and Asian, white and black women gave a party for her. They called her the mother of the sea.

So, yes, we cripple our children, we cripple each other with those designations that if you're a brick mason you shouldn't love the ballet. Who made that rule? You ever see a person lay bricks? [She moves her hands in a precise bricklaying manner.] Because of the eye and the hands, of course he or she would like to see ballet. It is that precise, that established, that organized, that sort of development from the bottom to the top.

MOORE: Do you resent the fact that your mother wasn't there for much of your childhood?

ANGELOU: Oh, yes. Yes. I was an abandoned child as far as I was concerned, and Bailey also. We didn't hear from her--we heard maybe twice in seven years or something. And then I realized that she was funny and loving and that there are certainly two different kinds of parents. There is the person who can be a great parent of small children. They dress the children in these sweet little things with bows in their hair and beads on their shoestrings and nice, lovely little socks. But when those same children get to be 14 or 15, the parents don't know what to say to them as they grow breasts and testosterone hits the boy.

Well, my mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God--I thank God every time I think of it--I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult. When she found out I was pregnant, she said, "All right. Run me a bath, please." Well, in my family, that's really a very nice thing for somebody to ask you to do. Maybe two or three times in my life she had asked me to run her a bath. So I ran her a bath and then she invited me in the bathroom. My mother sat down in the bathtub. She asked me, "Do you love the boy?" I said no. "Does he love you?" I said no. "Well, there's no point in ruining three lives. We're going to have us a baby."

And she delivered Guy--because she was a nurse also. She took me to the hospital. It was during one of the Jewish holidays, and my doctor wasn't there. My mother went in, told the nurses who she was, she washed up, they took me into the delivery room. She got up on the table on her knees with me and put her shoulder against my knee and took my hand, and every time a pain would come she'd tell a joke. I would laugh and laugh [she laughs uproariously] and bear down. And she said, "Here he comes, here he comes." And she put her hand on him first, my son.

So throughout her life she liberated me. Liberated me constantly. Respected me, respected what I tried to do, believed in me. I'd go out in San Francisco--I'd be visiting her, I was living in Los Angeles--and stay really late at some after-hours joint. Mother knew all of them and knew all the bartenders. And I'd be having a drink and laughing, and the bartender would say on the phone, "Yeah, Mama, yeah she's here." She'd say to me: "Baby, it's your mother. Come home. Let the streets know you have somewhere to go."

MOORE: It seems your mother and Bailey always came to your rescue. Were they more vigilant, do you think, because you didn't speak for so long?

ANGELOU: All those years ago I'd been a mute, and my mother and my brother knew that in times of strife and extreme stress, I was likely to retreat to mutism. Mutism is so addictive. And I don't think its powers ever go away. It's as if it's just behind my view, just behind my right shoulder or my left shoulder. If I move quickly, it moves, so I can't see it. But it's always there saying, "You can always come back to me. You have nothing to do--just stop talking." So, when I've been in stress, my mother or my brother, or both sometimes, would come wherever I was, New York, California, anywhere, and say, "Hello, hello, talk to me. Come on, let's go. We'll have a game of Scrabble or pinochle and let's talk. Tell me a story." Because they were astute enough to recognize the power of mutism, I finally was astute enough to recognize the power of their love.

MOORE: What went through your mind during the years you were mute?

ANGELOU: Oh, yes, I memorized poetry. I would test myself, memorizing a conversation that went by when I wasn't in it. I memorized 60 Shakespearean sonnets. And some of the things I memorized, I'd never heard them spoken, so I memorized them according to the cadence that I heard in my head. I loved Edgar Allan Poe and I memorized everything I could find. And I loved Paul Laurence Dunbar--still do--so I would memorize 75 poems. It was like putting a CD on. If I wanted to, I'd just run through my memory and think, that's one I want to hear.

So I believe that my brain reconstructed itself during those years. I believe that the areas in the brain which provide and promote physical speech had nothing to do. I believe that the synapses of the brain, instead of just going from A to B, since B wasn't receptive, the synapses went from A to R. You see what I mean? And so, I've been able to develop a memory quite unusual, which has allowed me to learn languages, really quite a few. I seem to be able to direct the brain; I can say, do that. I say, remember this, remember that. And it's caught! [She snaps her fingers as if to emphasize "caught."]

MOORE: You lived with your grandmother during your silent years. How did she respond?

ANGELOU: She said, "Sister, Momma don't care what these people say, that you must be an idiot, a moron, `cause you can't talk. Momma don't care. Momma know that when you and the good Lord get ready, you gon' be a teacher."

MOORE: If your mother liberated you to think big, what gifts did your grandmother give you?

ANGELOU: She gave me so many gifts. Confidence that I was loved. She taught me not to lie to myself or anyone else and not to boast. She taught me to admit that, to me, the emperor has no clothes. He may be dressed in the finery of the ages to everybody else, but if I don't see it, to admit that I don't see it. Because of her, I think, I have remained a very simple woman. What you see is all there is. I have no subterfuge. And she taught me not to complain.

My grandmother had one thing that she would do for me about twice a year. Shall I tell you? [She laughs loudly.] Momma would see a whiner, a complainer come down the hill. And she would call me in. She'd say, "Sister, Sister, come out here." I'd go and look up the hill and a complainer was trudging. And the man or woman would come into the store, and my grandmother would ask, "How you feel today?"

"Ah, Sister Henderson, I tell you I just hate the winter. It makes my face crack and my shins burn."

And Momma'd just say, "Uh-huh," and then look at me. And as soon as the person would leave, my grandmother would say, "Sister, come here." I'd stand right in front of her. She'd say, "There are people all over the world who went to sleep last night who did not wake again. Their beds have become their cooling boards, their blankets have become their winding sheets. They would give anything for just five minutes of what she was complaining about."

MOORE: Did you write during your childhood?

ANGELOU: Well, I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then. I would write some--of course it was terrible--but I'd always written something down.

MOORE: I read that you wrote the inaugural poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," in a hotel room. Were you on the road when you composed it?

ANGELOU: I keep a hotel room here in Winston when I'm writing. I take a room for about a month. And I try to be in the room by 6 a.m., so I get up, make coffee and keep a thermos and I go out to the hotel. I would have had everything removed from the room, wall hangings and all that stuff. It's just a bed, a table and a chair, Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a bottle of sherry, a yellow pad and pens, and I go to work. And I work 'til about twelve or one; one if it's going well, twelve if it isn't. Then I come home and pretend to operate in the familiar, you know?

MOORE: Where does writing rank in your accomplishments?

ANGELOU: I'm happy to be a writer, of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use. So the writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects--nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs--ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.

LUCINDA MOORE is an associate editor. She wrote "Capturing America's Fight for Freedom" in the July 2000 issue.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Turning 75 this month, Maya Angelou has led many lives. She is best known as a writer, for her numerous books of poetry and her six poignant memoirs, including the masterful 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In February, she won a Grammy for the recorded reading of her most recent memoir, A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.