Maya Angelou

Marguerite Annie Johnson was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and card dealer ^[1]. Her older brother Bailey could not manage the name Marguerite and called her Maya, a nickname that stayed with her for life ^[2].

After their parents separated, the two children, aged three and four, were sent alone by train to Stamps, Arkansas, wearing wrist tags that identified them to the conductor. There they were raised by their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, who owned a general store that survived the Depression and served the town's Black community ^[1]. The segregated Arkansas of the 1930s, with its cotton fields, church life, and daily humiliations, later supplied the setting for the opening chapters of her first memoir.

At about age eight, during a stay with her mother in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. After the man was found dead, apparently killed in retaliation, the child concluded that her voice could kill and stopped speaking to almost everyone for roughly five years ^[3]. Back in Stamps, a family friend named Bertha Flowers drew her out of silence with books, reading aloud from Dickens and Shakespeare and insisting that language must be spoken to be fully alive ^[1]. That recovery through literature became the founding story of Maya Angelou's career.

As a teenager she moved to San Francisco to live with her mother, attended George Washington High School, and studied dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School ^[2]. At sixteen she talked her way into a job on the city's streetcars, becoming, by her own account and that of later biographers, the first Black woman to work as a San Francisco streetcar conductor ^[3]. Weeks after finishing high school in 1945 she gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson, and spent the following years supporting him through work as a cook, waitress, and dancer.

A short marriage around 1951 to Tosh Angelos, a Greek American sailor, gave her the surname she later reshaped. Performing calypso at the Purple Onion nightclub in San Francisco, she combined her childhood nickname with a variant of her married name and became Maya Angelou ^[2]. The stage carried her further than she expected: in 1954 and 1955 she toured Europe and Africa in a State Department production of the opera Porgy and Bess, and in 1957 she recorded an album, Miss Calypso ^[1].

Moving to New York at the end of the 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where novelists including John Oliver Killens pushed her to take prose seriously ^[4]. In 1960 she co-wrote and performed in Cabaret for Freedom, a revue staged to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s organization then appointed her its northern coordinator ^[3]. The early 1960s took her abroad again. She lived in Cairo, where she edited the English language weekly The Arab Observer, and then in Accra, Ghana, where she worked for the University of Ghana, wrote for the Ghanaian Times, and befriended Malcolm X during his 1964 visit ^[4]. She returned to the United States intending to help him build a new organization shortly before his assassination in 1965.

The best known of Maya Angelou achievements arrived in 1969, when Random House published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The memoir, covering her life from age three to seventeen, was written after the editor Robert Loomis, prompted by James Baldwin, dared her to attempt autobiography as literature ^[4]. The book became a bestseller, was nominated for the National Book Award, and stayed on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list for roughly two years ^[1]. Its frank treatment of rape and racism also made it one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools and libraries ^[3].

Six further autobiographies followed, from Gather Together in My Name (1974) to Mom & Me & Mom (2013), tracing her adult life through show business, motherhood, the civil rights movement, and expatriate Africa ^[2]. Her first poetry collection, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her performance in the Broadway play Look Away earned a Tony Award nomination in 1973 ^[1]. In 1972 her screenplay for the film Georgia, Georgia made her one of the first Black women to have an original script produced by Hollywood ^[3].

On January 20, 1993, she read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, the first inaugural poet since Robert Frost in 1961; her recording of the poem won a Grammy Award for best spoken word album ^[5]. She won two further Grammys in the same category, and in 2011 President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States ^[5].

Angelou's only child, Guy Johnson, became a poet and novelist, and their bond ran through all of her memoirs; she often said that raising him was her greatest accomplishment ^[2]. She married at least twice: to Tosh Angelos in the early 1950s and to the English writer and builder Paul du Feu from 1974 to about 1983 ^[1]. She declined to give a precise count of her marriages, telling interviewers the number was nobody's business, and biographers have respected the ambiguity ^[4].

She stood six feet tall, a fact she wrote about with humor, and she never attended college, though she eventually held dozens of honorary doctorates and asked to be addressed as Dr. Angelou ^[3]. Fluent or conversant in several languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and Fanti, she credited her years abroad with widening her sense of what a Black American writer could be ^[2].

Her circle of friends crossed the century's cultural map: James Baldwin, whom she called a brother, the television producer and host Oprah Winfrey, who described Angelou as her mentor, and figures from both the King and Malcolm X wings of the freedom movement ^[4]. She was also famous as a cook, publishing two cookbooks late in life and hosting long dinners at her home in Winston-Salem ^[2].

In 1982 Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, appointed her the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies, a lifetime chair she held for more than three decades ^[6]. She taught courses on poetry, philosophy, and African American culture, and she kept a demanding lecture schedule into her eighties, traveling by bus in later years after deciding against flying ^[6].

Her public presence hardly slowed. She directed the feature film Down in the Delta in 1998, recorded albums, wrote essay collections such as Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993), and read her poem "A Brave and Startling Truth" at the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations in 1995 ^[1]. In 2008 she campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and then supported Barack Obama in the general election ^[5].

Maya Angelou died at her home in Winston-Salem on May 28, 2014, at the age of 86, after a period of declining health ^[5]. Tributes came from President Obama, who called her one of the brightest lights of her time, and from writers, students, and readers across the world. A memorial service was held at Wake Forest University the following month ^[6].

Any Maya Angelou biography has to reckon with how thoroughly she changed the autobiography as a form. By writing about sexual violence, single motherhood, and Black girlhood with novelistic craft, she opened space for generations of memoirists, and Caged Bird became a fixture of American classrooms even as it kept drawing censorship attempts ^[3]. Scholars often treat her seven volume series as a single sustained work, among the longest autobiographical projects in American letters ^[4].

Her poems circulate far beyond print. "Still I Rise" and "Phenomenal Woman" are recited at graduations, rallies, and funerals, and lines from her work have been set to music, quoted by presidents, and stitched into popular culture ^[1]. In 2015 the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor, and in 2022 she became the first Black woman to appear on the United States quarter, part of the American Women Quarters program ^[5].

Among the most cited Maya Angelou facts is the simple range of her working life: streetcar conductor, dancer, opera cast member, journalist in Egypt and Ghana, civil rights organizer, screenwriter, professor, and inaugural poet ^[2]. That range, joined to a voice readers trusted, is why her books remain in print in dozens of languages and why her name still anchors arguments about what American literature includes ^[6].