She manages to fully reveal that national sore without picking at it, a neat trick that (like her early stint as an exotic dancer) requires considerable restraint and her own steely goodwill.Īngelou’s mother had an outsize personality, to say the least. Though she is the ostensible subject of all those autobiographies (if she’d started publishing them today, we’d probably call them “memoirs” because of their limited focus), her subject is also growing up black in Jim Crow America. Clearly, she chooses to write for readers as open, playful and straightforward as herself. Neither that poem nor her astounding seven autobiographies are aimed at a highbrow literary audience, though Angelou is smart and gifted enough to write for any audience she pleases. Several generations of Americans warmly remember “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem she recited, in her typically stylized fashion, for Bill Clinton’s 1993 presidential inauguration. Her best-known work, “ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a harrowing account of her muteness after she was raped as a child, is still widely taught. She is a one-woman autobiography industry, as well as a poet, playwright and performer, but mostly she is a Large Public Presence. “My mother was irresistible,” Maya Angelou says, but “irresistible” is also a word that many readers have applied to Angelou herself.
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