She was the kind of woman you rarely got to read about in American literature in the 1960s. One of the women who helped Angelou find her voice was a teacher in Stamps, Arkansas, named Bertha Flowers. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say.”Īngelou often wrote in hotel rooms with a few essentials: a deck of cards, a crossword puzzle, a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a bottle of sherry. In those five years, I read every book in the black school library. She would later explain, “I stopped speaking for five years. In the memoir, Angelou (born Marguerite Johnson) boldly told the heartbreaking truths of her childhood, including how she was raped at the age of 7 by her mother’s boyfriend. That book became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday. “The next morning, Judy Feiffer called a friend of hers at Random House and said, ‘You know the poet Maya Angelou? If you could get her to write a book.’” “We enjoyed each other immensely and sat up until 3 or 4 in the morning, drinking Scotch and telling tales,” Angelou went on. Writer Jules Feiffer and his then-wife, Judy. James Baldwin, the novelist and activist, took her to the party, which was at the home of the cartoonist. “At the time, I was really only concerned with poetry, though I had written a television series,” she would recall. Maya Angelou published the first of her seven memoirs not long after she distinguished herself as the star raconteur at a dinner party.
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