Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime & FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, April 22 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery Tuesday, April 19. Order within 23 hrs 4 mins

In Stock.

As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app. Want to listen? Try Audible.

[{"displayPrice":"$7.54","priceAmount":7.54,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"7","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"54","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"KTVPxpbJEkpG%2BSuIcSDxeDG9ZkCwJ000r57j8ZgvI3X3AmPJJJX2rw0RzGOGiCg58YeN6tiKGDYNs3ptGxo%2FzoIGUdjvKGe%2F7xBpv0TpBlI6D8fBc0WRYz%2FENS7ZAk1eeyvXhm2ih%2Bw%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"},{"displayPrice":"$7.15","priceAmount":7.15,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"7","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"15","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"6CmQNNnx6UojpuJ3oNAigSB0WgdOWPGznZydqe1e9D0y6U3E1YA9jKPwWPBFW1Ar%2B2mvzHWoK5OEBbCUbOgRq0S9CTv9Gd9NGWvIlwu3c84%2Bt2LdKEOYEUNaS00CBLzMNkrrxpjjRrZGuE7Oe3rS6rUbdtADMqa9m0q2dEqbMH7SAt%2FkY9Ub6RXYMT67BjOs","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED"}]

$$7.54 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Thursday, April 28 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery April 21 - 25

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Martistore

Fulfilled by Amazon

Share <Embed>

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$5.99
+ $4.16 shipping

Sold by: from_my_shelf

Added

Not added

$6.85
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Blackwell's U.K. *dispatched from UK*

Added

Not added

$10.97
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: bargainbookstores-

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Mass Market Paperback – April 21, 2009

by Maya Angelou (Author), Oprah Winfrey (Foreword)

17,730 ratings

in Southern U.S. Biographies

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$7.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$21.99

$15.47

$9.99

Paperback, Deckle Edge

"Please retry"

$15.49

$4.25

$1.89

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

$7.54

$5.91

$1.72

Preloaded Digital Audio Player, Unabridged

"Please retry"

—

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

Enhance your purchase

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin

Language

English
Publisher

Ballantine Books
Publication date

April 21, 2009
Dimensions

4.12 x 0.76 x 6.85 inches
ISBN-10

0345514408
ISBN-13

978-0345514400
Lexile measure

1010L
See all details

Frequently bought together

Maya Angelou
2,898
Paperback
126 offers from $1.15
Maya Angelou
1,890
Hardcover
58 offers from $10.95
Maya Angelou
1,176
Paperback
84 offers from $3.59
Stan Hardy
55
Paperback
1 offer from $14.99
244
Paperback
16 offers from $8.24
Maya Angelou
1,742
Hardcover
84 offers from $1.39

Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

She said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.
Highlighted by 5,166 Kindle readers
Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware.
Highlighted by 4,400 Kindle readers
Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.
Highlighted by 3,654 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

James Baldwin says, “Liberates the reader…such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”


	The Complete Poetry	Letter to My Daughter	Phenomenal Woman	Mom & Me & Mom	The Heart of a Woman	The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
Discover more books by Maya Angelou	A complete collection of poetry, including Maya Angelou's inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning”	Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays	A collection of beloved poems about women from the iconic Maya Angelou	A moving memoir about the legendary author’s relationship with her own mother	Read unforgettable vignettes of Billie Holiday and Malcom X, as Maya Angelou chronicles the burdens of a Black mother in America	Maya Angelou’s classic memoirs have had an enduring impact on American literature and culture

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin

About the Author

Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas. In addition to her bestselling autobiographies, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Heart of a Woman, she wrote numerous volumes of poetry, among them Phenomenal Woman, And Still I Rise, On the Pulse of Morning, and Mother. Maya Angelou died in 2014.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

"What you looking at me for?
I didn't come to stay . . ."

I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember. Other things were more important.

"What you looking at me for?
I didn't come to stay . . ."

Whether I could remember the rest of the poem or not was immaterial. The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and the air would cool my palms.

"What you looking at me for . . . ?"

The children's section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling over my well-known forgetfulness.

The dress I wore was lavender taffeta, and each time I breathed it rustled, and now that I was sucking in air to breathe out shame it sounded like crepe paper on the back of hearses.

As I'd watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I put it on I'd look like a movie star. (It was silk and that made up for the awful color.) I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world. Hanging softly over the black Singer sewing machine, it looked like magic, and when people saw me wearing it they were going to run up to me and say, "Marguerite [sometimes it was 'dear Marguerite'], forgive us, please, we didn't know who you were," and I would answer generously, "No, you couldn't have known. Of course I forgive you."

Just thinking about it made me go around with angel's dust sprinkled over my face for days. But Easter's early morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway. It was old-lady-long too, but it didn't hide my skinny legs, which had been greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and powdered with the Arkansas red clay. The age-faded color made my skin look dirty like mud, and everyone in church was looking at my skinny legs.

Wouldn't they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn't let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about "my daddy must of been a Chinaman" (I thought they meant made out of china, like a cup) because my eyes were so small and squinty. Then they would understand why I had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs' tails and snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.

"What you looking ..." The minister's wife leaned toward me, her long yellow face full of sorry. She whispered, "I just come to tell you, it's Easter Day." I repeated, jamming the words together, "Ijustcometotellyouit'sEasterDay," as low as possible. The giggles hung in the air like melting clouds that were waiting to rain on me. I held up two fingers, close to my chest, which meant that I had to go to the toilet, and tiptoed toward the rear of the church. Dimly, somewhere over my head, I heard ladies saying, "Lord bless the child," and "Praise God." My head was up and my eyes were open, but I didn't see anything. Halfway down the aisle, the church exploded with "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" and I tripped over a foot stuck out from the children's pew. I stumbled and started to say something, or maybe to scream, but a green persimmon, or it could have been a lemon, caught me between the legs and squeezed. I tasted the sour on my tongue and felt it in the back of my mouth. Then before I reached the door, the sting was burning down my legs and into my Sunday socks. I tried to hold, to squeeze it back, to keep it from speeding, but when I reached the church porch I knew I'd have to let it go, or it would probably run right back up to my head and my poor head would burst like a dropped watermelon, and all the brains and spit and tongue and eyes would roll all over the place. So I ran down into the yard and let it go. I ran, peeing and crying, not toward the toilet out back but to our house. I'd get a whipping for it, to be sure, and the nasty children would have something new to tease me about. I laughed anyway, partially for the sweet release; still, the greater joy came not only from being liberated from the silly church but from the knowledge that I wouldn't die from a busted head.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.

It is an unnecessary insult.

Chapter One

When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed—"To Whom It May Concern"—that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.

Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother. A porter had been charged with our welfare—he got off the train the next day in Arizona—and our tickets were pinned to my brother's inside coat pocket.

I don't remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up. Negro passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for "the poor little motherless darlings" and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad.

Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises.

The town reacted to us as its inhabitants had reacted to all things new before our coming. It regarded us a while without curiosity but with caution, and after we were seen to be harmless (and children) it closed in around us, as a real mother embraces a stranger's child. Warmly, but not too familiarly.

We lived with our grandmother and uncle in the rear of the Store (it was always spoken of with a capital s), which she had owned some twenty-five years.

Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the sawmen in the lumberyard (east Stamps) and the seedmen at the cotton gin (west Stamps). Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time, assured her business success. From being a mobile lunch counter, she set up a stand between the two points of fiscal interest and supplied the workers' needs for a few years. Then she had the Store built in the heart of the Negro area. Over the years it became the lay center of activities in town. On Saturdays, barbers sat their customers in the shade on the porch of the Store, and troubadours on their ceaseless crawlings through the South leaned across its benches and sang their sad songs of The Brazos while they played juice harps and cigarbox guitars.

The formal name of the Store was the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store. Customers could find food staples, a good variety of colored thread, mash for hogs, corn for chickens, coal oil for lamps, light bulbs for the wealthy, shoestrings, hair dressing, balloons, and flower seeds. Anything not visible had only to be ordered.

Until we became familiar enough to belong to the Store and it to us, we were locked up in a Fun House of Things where the attendant had gone home for life.

Each year I watched the field across from the Store turn caterpillar green, then gradually frosty white. I knew exactly how long it would be before the big wagons would pull into the front yard and load on the cotton pickers at daybreak to carry them to the remains of slavery's plantations.

During the picking season my grandmother would get out of bed at four o'clock (she never used an alarm clock) and creak down to her knees and chant in a sleep-filled voice, "Our Father, thank you for letting me see this New Day. Thank you that you didn't allow the bed I lay on last night to be my cooling board, nor my blanket my winding sheet. Guide my feet this day along the straight and narrow, and help me to put a bridle on my tongue. Bless this house, and everybody in it. Thank you, in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen."

Before she had quite arisen, she called our names and issued orders, and pushed her large feet into homemade slippers and across the bare Iye-washed wooden floor to light the coal-oil lamp.

The lamplight in the Store gave a soft make-believe feeling to our world which made me want to whisper and walk about on tiptoe. The odors of onions and oranges and kerosene had been mixing all night and wouldn't be disturbed until the wooded slat was removed from the door and the early morning air forced its way in with the bodies of people who had walked miles to reach the pickup place.

"Sister, I'll have two cans of sardines."

"I'm gonna work so fast today I'm gonna make you look like you standing still."

"Lemme have a hunk uh cheese and some sody crackers."

"Just gimme a couple them fat peanut paddies." That would be from a picker who was taking his lunch. The greasy brown paper sack was stuck behind the bib of his overalls. He'd use the candy as a snack before the noon sun called the workers to rest.

In those tender mornings the Store was full of laughing, joking, boasting and bragging. One man was going to pick two hundred pounds of cotton, and another three hundred. Even the children were promising to bring home fo' bits and six bits.

The champion picker of the day before was the hero of the dawn. If he prophesied that the cotton in today's field was going to be sparse and stick to the bolls like glue, every listener would grunt a hearty agreement.

The sound of the empty cotton sacks dragging over the floor and the murmurs of waking people were sliced by the cash register as we rang up the five-cent sales.

If the morning sounds and smells were touched with the supernatural, the late afternoon had all the features of the normal Arkansas life. In the dying sunlight the people dragged, rather than their empty cotton sacks.

Brought back to the Store, the pickers would step out of the backs of trucks and fold down, dirt-disappointed, to the ground. No matter how much they had picked' it wasn't enough. Their wages wouldn't even get them out of debt to my grandmother, not to mention the staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown.

The sounds of the new morning had been replaced with grumbles about cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and dusty rows. In later years I was to confront the stereotyped picture of gay song-singing cotton pickers with such inordinate rage that I was told even by fellow Blacks that my paranoia was embarrassing. But I had seen the fingers cut by the mean little cotton bolls, and I had witnessed the backs and shoulders and arms and legs resisting any further demands.

Some of the workers would leave their sacks at the Store to be picked up the following morning, but a few had to take them home for repairs. I winced to picture them sewing the coarse material under a coal-oil lamp with fingers stiffening from the day's work. In too few hours they would have to walk back to Sister Henderson's Store, get vittles and load, again, onto the trucks. Then they would face another day of trying to earn enough for the whole year with the heavy knowledge that they were going to end the season as they started it. Without the money or credit necessary to sustain a family for three months. In cotton-picking time the late afternoons revealed the harshness of Black Southern life, which in the early morning had been softened by nature's blessing of grogginess, forgetfulness and the soft lamplight.

Start reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (April 21, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345514408
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345514400
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1010L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.12 x 0.76 x 6.85 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Southern U.S. Biographies
- #4 in Deals in Books
- #5 in Literary Criticism & Theory

Customer Reviews:
17,730 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Maya Angelou

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Maya Angelou has been waitress, singer, actress, dancer, activist, filmmaker, writer and mother. As well as her autobiography she has written several volumes of poetry, including 'On the Pulse of the Morning' for the inauguration of President Clinton. She now has a life-time appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Customer reviews

5 star		84%
4 star		10%
3 star		4%
2 star		1%
1 star		1%

How are ratings calculated?

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Leon

It is amazing that we can hear Dr

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Here's my review on one of the three books that I've read by Maya Angelou:

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings:
Smiling Through Sadness

Maya Angelou’s first memoir, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, captures the sweetest, purest, and the most honest inner voice of a black child who grew up to be a heroine. Dr. Angelou does not censor anything; She wants us to know it all. It is so true, straightforward, and uncensored that many white parents have attempted to ban this book from schools. This memorable and mysterious autobiography - originally published in 1969 - was followed by another masterpiece entitled: Gather Together In My Name. Both books are available in audio format recorded by Random House Audio. It is amazing that we can hear Dr. Angelou reading her own books to us just like a grandmother putting us to sleep with her adventurous bed-time stories.
Dr. Maya Angelou, who has been honored and awarded numerous times, is a pure soul writing about the evil world of the racist America keeping a matching voice on each chapter of her life. When she is writing about her experiences as a five-year-old, you hear a five-year-old talking to you. Being one of the most recognized public figures and a civil rights movement’s heroine, Maya Angelou, gives us a poetic journey of how a poor disadvantaged black girl was rejected by everyone including her own mother, raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and had to witness his crippled uncle hiding under a pile of onions and potatoes to be protected from racist white beasts on a regular basis. The good news is that the story of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings does not end here. This bird sings her heart out until the cage breaks and she becomes our national treasure.
This powerful modern American classis has changed many readers’ (and listeners’) hearts and minds in a way that every great work of literature should. This book became the best-seller immediately after it was published. What added to my personal itch to read this book when I was first introduced to it was the fact that Dr. Angelou has described William Shakespeare as one of her strongest influence on her life and works. Shakespeare is my all-time favorite “pennist.”
Buy it, read it, keep it, reread it, highlight it, talk about it, advertise it, buy more of it and give it out as a gift, learn from it, and apply what you’ve learned from it in your daily life. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is coming from a heart and soul of someone who had to witness the unnecessary, harsh, and brutal insults that no ordinary human being can bear. Maya Angelou writes the story of a human who was pushed to her limits by the ugliness of this world and while being in a saddest cage, sang the happiest song. Once precious Maya Angelou told her younger generation that seem to be unable to cope with the racism in the past and present:
“You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”

278 people found this helpful

Helpful

Helen the Swimmer

Why am I reading this amazing book so late in life?

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2018

Verified Purchase

Maya Angelou is, of course, very famous, and the title of this book is known to most people. For years, with a few exceptions, I have been reading nonfiction. I have been intensely interested in a few subjects, which changed somewhat as I grew older, but rarely turned to fiction. It was no doubt because of an attempt to remedy my ignorance that I picked this up, as well as the fact that it was only two dollars on Book Bub. I now understand why Maya Angelou was such a giant figure in American literature. In rich, sometimes poetic language, she brings the reader into her world of social tensions and appreciation of her culture. She is able to demonstrate the degree of her strength and intelligence, and I came to a great appreciation of this major writer.

91 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jacob Todd

Classic for a reason!

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2017

Verified Purchase

I'm not sure why it took me so long to read this book! I've heard about it for years, seen it referenced in other books and movies, yet I always avoided reading it myself. After coming across it again on the Amazon store, I decided to go ahead. Maybe I would get bored one day and skim it.
Oh my goodness.
As soon as I started reading it, I didn't stop. Starting at 7:00 pm., by the time the birds signaled dawn, I finished the last page with tears in my eyes.
Aside from the obviously touching story, Maya Angelou is a truly gifted writer. She was able to transform her writing as her character (herself) aged. She wrote from the mind of a child in the beginning, and by the end, she had a new maturity.
Beautiful. Worth all the accolades it's received thus far.

83 people found this helpful

Helpful

Trancelucence

For me, profoundly depressing

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2018

Verified Purchase

I adored Maya Angelou. Brilliant, loving, an inspiration, a mother to us all. So I FINALLY got around to reading her first book. Although it clearly evinces her unique perspective and gift for writing, it is so sad and full of disappointment, betrayal and tragedy my heart ached. I'll add that aside from race issues, from a feminine and family perspective my own early life had several parallels to Angelou's. As Oprah Winfrey says in her introduction, hers did too (yet the book had the opposite effect on her).

I give it two stars instead of one for her writing skill and the purely intellectual knowledge that she prevailed in life, and in a BIG way. But had I not known this... Oddly enough, this book had the opposite effect on me as The Color Purple (the book, not the film- I didn't care for the film). Although the Color Purple contains similar themes and threads, for me it SOARED. I guess that has most to do with the fact that the story is complete, we get to see Celie triumph over abuse and adversity. Although we KNOW Angelou does, we don't experience it along with her. Will I read the rest of her story, contained in her subsequent books? I don't know, maybe.

42 people found this helpful

Helpful

Deerefam5

Caution: This book contains some heavy content

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2021

Verified Purchase

My daughter did online school this year in high school. She had to choose two books from a list to read at the end of the year. This was one of those books. I happened to be out of reading material, so I grabbed this book to read. It was hard to read what Maya went through in life. She was an overcomer. I will continue to share some delegations, so further reading will contain spoiler alerts. Maya was raped by her mom’s live in boyfriend at the age of 8. Her brother was having sex before a teenager and she was the “baby” on the lookout. She loved a book that first introduced homosexuality to her and found herself aroused by her friend (female) that was undressing at her house. She then propositioned a neighborhood boy for sex, and I never did finish the book. I just wanted to give a heads up. I know some will be totally fine with this book, and it does have high reviews. However, if you are on the more conservative end of the spectrum, this will most likely not be a book you want your teenager to read.

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Miscellany Pages

Compelling, Moving and Perceptive Memoir

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2018

Verified Purchase

Rating: 4 stars

Category: Memoir

Synopsis: ‘Memoir’ seems far too simple a word to describe I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelou, a writer and civil rights activist (among numerous other careers) recounts her childhood experiences growing up first with her grandmother in the poor, isolated small-town Stamps and later with her mother in the lively glamour of San Francisco. However, she also relates these experiences into much wider issues from oppression to women’s sexuality. Someone asked me what the book is about and I found it so hard to summarise – it is a kaleidoscope of social exploration, perception, complex relationships, powerful moments and wisdom.

Review:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was my first experience of reading a memoir and I had my doubts… after all, don’t we read fiction to escape from real life? However, I was immediately engrossed by the combination of Maya Angelou’s compelling voice and the incredible variety and depth of her experiences. Her story comes close to covering the entire spectrum of human emotion; it leads readers through the horrifying, funny then achingly sad in a relatively short space of time.

Its almost lyrical style means the memoir reads almost like fiction and I had to keep reminding myself of its reality. In fact, Maya Angelou is credited with redefining the boundaries of autobiography, intending to ‘write an autobiography as literature.’

There is a thoughtful beauty in her writing, with so many words of wisdom that I had dozens of highlights on my Kindle and found it very difficult to pick just one favourite quote! However, I think the true poignancy of this memoir lies as much in the words she does not use.

"she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, “Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there."

It is understood that powerful moments such as this need no further commentary. Instead, they are allowed to speak for themselves.

Also, the approach taken to portraying the complex relationships in the book is very much one of interwoven moments rather than a monologue. No attempt is made to simplify or explain these relationships; to do so would be to reduce them, and detract from the way in which the memoir explores the true nature of human connections. I was particularly fascinated by Maya’s relationship with her mother and grandmother, as well as the influence these two starkly different women had on her life.

Something about the book, other than its genre, felt strange and different when I first started reading it. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but then I realised that I have not read a book from a child’s perspective for a very long time (since Room by Emma Donoghue). I always enjoy the immediacy of reading from children’s viewpoints, so focused on present experience, but I found young Maya’s unique, intensely observant view of the world especially captivating.

However, I also relished watching her child’s perspective mature throughout the book as she ages. With the progress of the story, Maya begins to challenge, as well as observe, the nature of our world. I felt privileged to read about the experiences of such an extraordinary woman, who has had a truly extraordinary life.

Favourite quote: “See, you don’t have to think about doing the right thing. If you’re for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.”

31 people found this helpful

Andie

So what's changed?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

It's sad that even now, someone like me born so many years later, can totally identify with Maya growing up as a black female. Still hoping for the best, preparing for the worst so that nothing surprises us.

48 people found this helpful

reg_sinclair

Remarkable book by a Remarkable Woman

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2019

Verified Purchase

The subject - a black woman brought up in the Deep South surrounded by bigotry and poverty - touches themes all too familiar to many but it is the writer's treatment of the material, thoughtful, measured, often amusing and never self-indulgent, communicated through the medium of a remarkably rich style of writing, which leaves the reader with a much deeper understanding of all the players involved at the time. In addition to the author there are some very memorable women, in particular Angelou's grandmother and her mother, the remarkable Vivian Baxter. The men, apart from her brother, Bailey, are lesser, more peripheral beings on the whole.

The writer writes of attitudes within the black community of which she is very gently critical, again in a thoughtful, completely unjudgemental way, and in that same, very muted, tone warns against victim complexes being sometimes unhelpful. Equality is about all being equal, having the same rights and opportunities, whether white or black, not vengeance for appalling ignorance, racist attitudes and shocking behaviour. This is a book written with great humanity and great dignity.

13 people found this helpful

Alicatz

Knowing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2018

Verified Purchase

I read this book many years ago whilst a teenager myself and loved it. I fell upon it again completely by accident and read it in a day and a half. It was better this time round as I have so much more understanding of the struggles, fights and hardness of life. I also recognise the sheer wonderment of the good things in life too. Her passions and loyalties, betrayals and endeavours are all told in a heart warming heart wrenching book that all should read or be studied at school like mice and men or to kill a mocking bird.

20 people found this helpful

John M

1st episode of the author's autobiography. Not as engaging as hoped.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2021

Verified Purchase

I wanted to really like this book and expected to take away insights into racial struggle and the toughness of life in 1930/40s America for a black person. It is the first instalment of the autobiography of Maya Angelou which has been showered with praise detailing her early life in Stamps, Arkansas, St. Louis and California.
However I'm afraid the best I can say is 'it had its moments'. There are a number of shortish chapters, but the narrative seemed quite broken and unengaging. There were examples of unabashed racism, especially the dental visit, but much of the trauma in Maya's early life were inflicted on her by here own community/ family or self-inflicted. I was expecting to be more engaged and affected by her story, but felt as if I was reading the action at a distance through a veil.

3 people found this helpful

See all reviews

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Mass Market Paperback – April 21, 2009

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

About the author

Maya Angelou

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new: $7.54$7.54 FREE delivery: Friday, April 22 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used: $7.15

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Mass Market Paperback – April 21, 2009

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

About the author

Maya Angelou

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$7.54

FREE delivery: Friday, April 22 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used:

$7.15