Question

1 page introduction on the poem i know why the caged bird sings combined with the author needed ri8 now

Answer 1

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume, published in 1969, of seven autobiographical works by singer, poet, actress, and writer Maya Angelou. It is arguably the most widely read and taught book by an African American woman. Its title comes from the poem "Sympathy" by African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of Angelou’s favorite writers.

In her distinctive lyrical prose, Angelou recounts the first seventeen years of her life, discussing her unsettled childhood in America in the 1930s and her changing relationships. When her parents separate, Maya and her brother Bailey, three and four years old respectively, are sent from their parental home in California back to the segregated South, to live with their grandmother, Momma, in rural Arkansas. Momma provides a strict moral center to their lives. At the age of eight, Maya goes to stay with her mother in St. Louis, where she is molested and raped by her mother’s partner. With her brother she later returns to stay with Momma before returning again to live with her mother and her mother’s husband in California. The book ends with the birth of Maya’s first child, Guy.

Angelou became a prominent figure in the American civil rights movement, fighting for African-American rights during the 1960s. She became a close associate of Malcolm X, and later of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When King was assassinated in 1968, Angelou was inspired by a meeting with James Baldwin and cartoonist Jules Feiffer to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a way of dealing with death of her friend, and to draw attention to her own personal struggles with racism.

Against the backdrop of racial tensions in the South, Angelou confronts the traumatic events of her own childhood and explores the evolution of her own strong identity as an African American woman. Her individual and cultural feelings of displacement are mediated through her passion for literature, which proves both healing and empowering.