Maya Angelou

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Biographical sketch of Maya Angelou and One of her Literary Works
Maya Angelou was born at Marguerite Annie Johnson in ST. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. Throughout the series, Angelou refers to herself by some names. Her mother liked to call her Ritie or Baby. Her thoughtless employer, Mrs. Culinan, called her Mary, but it was her brother Bailey who named her Maya. She became an American poet, author, dancer, a singer and an actress and published several autobiographies, poetic books and three essay books. (Lupton 5)
She recounts her desolate journey and arrival in the early pages of the book that has since brought her fame, “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” (Angelou & Joanne 1). She published the book in 1970 when she was forty-one. The book talks about Angelou’s life from the time she was at the age of three to the age of sixteen. This book is the first book to depict the life of African American woman out of the five biographies. In Caged Bird, Angelou reconstructs her childhood as a young black girl living with her protective, but stern grandmother, Annie Henderson, her brother Bailey Johnson and her uncle, Willie. It vividly recalls life in Stamps, Arkansas, with its Christian traditions and its segregated society.
The books central theme was the African American woman pain in America where most women got sexually assaulted and traumatized through discrimination and racism in the South. She brings in the issue of conflict as a literary tool, suspense, symbolism and personification to bring out the how her life was and what happened to her back then.

The plotting of the book starts n dumped in Stamps where as a kid she got dropped off Arkansas, and her story begins. She concludes the book with her life as being pregnant and giving birth to a baby boy who she says gives her true happiness as a mother despite the trials and tribulations of her life. (Lupton 7)
Works Cited
Angelou, Maya, and Joanne M. Braxton. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A
Casebook. New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. Print.
Lupton, Mary J. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1998. Print.