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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiographical account of the early years of Maya Angelou, an African American writer and poet, one of the most renowned and influential voices of the 20th century. A poet, writer, singer, memoirist, historian, playwright, performer, stage and screen producer, director, and civil rights activist, Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She was educated at Lafayette Country Training School, George Washington High School, and Mission High School.

Angelou became the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco, and her love and talents for the arts enabled her to do well in such fields as singing, dancing, and playwriting. She nourished herself upon the works of writers like Paul Lawrence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), based on one of her short stories, was the first short story by a black woman to be adapted for a feature film. Her experience of undisguised racial discrimination during her childhood stamped an indelible mark upon her life, leading to her lifelong career as a civil rights activist.

Introduction to the Novel

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969 and earned Angelou widespread critical acclaim and enormous popular success. Among her numerous honors for the book, Angelou received a National Book Award nomination. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times regarded I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as “a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir … [its] beauty is not in the story but in the telling.”

The novel is a good example of how determination, will power, and a love of literature can help one fight against racism and childhood traumatic experiences. The book narrates Angelou's early years in the racist town of Stamps, where her grandmother ran the town's only black-owned general merchandise store. Angelou vividly recounts the customs and harsh circumstances of black life in the segregated south, where economic hardship, hatred, and denigration were a routine part of daily life.

Many of the problems Angelou confronted in her childhood stem from the overt racism of her white neighbors. As she reflects upon their impact on her early years, she writes, “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.”

Writing Style

Angelou's writing attempts to reenact her own life story and the whole African American experience that shaped her psyche and writing. Her autobiographies are written in a conversational manner, and she tries to appease the pain of her experience by using simple and colloquial language and allowing her readers to participate in her feelings. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a spiritual odyssey about the survival of a black girl in a hostile society. And this is not the story of an individual black girl; it is the story of the whole African American race for whom Angelou is the spokeswoman.

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