Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, – May 28, ) was an American author and poet. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years · Maya Angelou Essay “The honorary duty of a human being is to love” (Maya Angelou). Maya Angelou is an African-American was born on April 4, , in St. Louis, Missouri. Maya Angelou's five autobiographical novels were met with critical and popular success Maya Angelou Essay Words | 5 Pages. Maya Angelou By consistently weaving the theme of motherhood into her literature, Maya Angelou creates both personal narratives and poems that the reader can relate to. Her exploration of this universal theme lends itself to
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Maya Angelou born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, — May 28, was an American author and poet. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences.
The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Singsessays by maya angelou, tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's long list of occupations has included pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, cast-member of the musical Porgy essays by maya angelou Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sinceshe has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King essays by maya angelou Malcolm X. Since the s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. InAngelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F.
Kennedy's inauguration in With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was heralded as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life.
She is highly respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labelled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, essays by maya angelou, and expanding the genre.
Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, essays by maya angelou, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews. Early years. Marguerite Johnson was born in St.
Louis, Missouri, on April 4,the second child of Bailey Johnson, a navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and card dealer. Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr. The first 17 years of Angelou's life are documented in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
When Angelou was three, and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended. Their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas alone by train to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St.
At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. She confessed it to her brother, essays by maya angelou told the rest of their family.
Freeman was found guilty, but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing, as she has stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name, essays by maya angelou.
And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone Shortly after Freeman's murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother once again. Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again. Flowers introduced her to authors such as Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe, Douglas Johnson historianand James Weldon Johnson, authors that would affect her life and career, as well as Black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.
When Angelou was 14, she and her brother returned to live with her mother in Oakland, California. During World War II, essays by maya angelou attended George Washington High School while studying dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School.
Before graduating, she worked as the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Three weeks after completing school, at the age of 17, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who also became a poet. Angelou's second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, recounts her life from age 17 to 19 and "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime.
She moved through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempted to raise her son without job training or advanced education. Adulthood and early career: — In her third essays by maya angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Angelou describes her three-year marriage to Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician Enistasious Tosh Angelos inessays by maya angelou, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the disapproval of her mother.
She took modern dances classes during this time, and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford.
Angelou and Ailey essays by maya angelou a dance team, calling themselves "Al and Rita", and performed Modern Dance at fraternal Black organizations throughout San Francisco, but never became successful. Angelou, her new husband, and son moved to New York City essays by maya angelou that she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.
After Angelou's marriage ended, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub The Purple Onion, where she sang and danced calypso music.
Up essays by maya angelou that point she went by the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at the strong suggestion essays by maya angelou her managers and supporters at The Purple Onion she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou", a "distinctive name" that set her apart and captured the feel of her Calypso dance performances.
During and Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She began her practice of trying to learn the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages. Inessays by maya angelou, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.
As Angelou described in her fourth autobiography, The Heart of a Woman, she met novelist James O. Killens inand at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she essays by maya angelou several major African-American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time.
After meeting and hearing civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, essays by maya angelou, Jr. speak inshe and Killens organized "the legendary" Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLCand she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator.
According to scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective". Angelou also began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism during this time. Africa to Caged Bird: — InAngelou performed in Jean Genet's The Blacks, along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, essays by maya angelou, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.
That year she met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married. She and her son Guy moved to Cairo with Make where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer. In her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Accra, Ghana, he to attend college, where he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.
Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there untillater relating her experiences as an African American residing in Ghana in her fifth autobiography, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. She became an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community.
She was a feature editor for The African Review, a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, wrote and broadcast for Radio Ghana, essays by maya angelou, and worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre. She performed in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin. In Accra, essays by maya angelou, she became close friends with Malcolm X during his visit in the early s. Writing about their relationship in her sixth and final autobiography A Song Flung Up to HeavenAngelou said she returned to the U, essays by maya angelou.
in to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward. Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing essays by maya angelou, and then essays by maya angelou back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career.
She worked as a market researcher in Watts and witnessed the riots in the summer of She acted in and wrote plays, and returned to New York in She met her life-long friend Rosa Guy and renewed her friendship with James Baldwin, whom she met in Paris in the s and called "my brother", during this time.
Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing. InMartin Luther King asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but "postpones again", and in what Angelou's biographers call "a macabre twist of essays by maya angelou, he was assassinated on her 40th birthday April 4.
Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her depression by her friend James Baldwin. As her biographers state, "If was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius". Despite almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated "Blacks, Blues, Black! Also ininspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Random House essays by maya angelou Robert Loomis, essays by maya angelou, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published inwhich brought her international recognition and acclaim.
Later career. Angelou's Georgia, Georgia, produced by a Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, the first screenplay written by a Black woman, was released in She also wrote the film's soundtrack, despite having very little additional input in the filming of the movie.
Angelou married Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of Germaine Greer, Paul du Feu, in San Francisco in In the next ten years, essays by maya angelou, as her biographers stated, "She had accomplished more than many artists hope to achieve in a lifetime".
She worked as a composer, writing for singer Roberta Flack and composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts and documentaries, autobiographies and poetry, produced plays, and was named visiting professors of several colleges and universities.
She was "a reluctant actor", and was nominated for a Tony Award in for her role in Look Away. In Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots.
She began being awarded with hundreds of awards and honorary degrees from colleges and universities from all over the world. In the late '70s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor. InAngelou and du Feu divorced.
Her attempts at producing and directing films were frustrated throughout the 80s. She returned to the southern United States inwhere she accepted the lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University essays by maya angelou Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she taught a variety of subjects that reflected her interests, including philosophy, ethics, theology, science, theater, essays by maya angelou writing.
Book TV: Maya Angelou \
, time: 10:20Maya Angelou Essays: Examples, Topics, Titles, & Outlines
Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, – May 28, ) was an American author and poet. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, and Brent Staples are all African-American writers who offer convincing arguments about prejudice. Maya Angelou's autobiographical essay entitled "Graduation" is about her high school graduation in a segregated public school in Arkansas. Angelou's story is like that of other black Works Cited Angelou, Maya · Maya Angelou, born April 4, as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, was raised in segregated rural Arkansas. She is a poet, historian, author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, and director. She has been working at Wake Forest University in north Carolina since She has published ten best-selling books and Read more
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