Links to the following:

1. sinificant people in Maya Angelou's life
2. Other web pages that Maya Angelou would find interesting
3. chronological pictures of Maya
4. significant experiences that affected Maya's life
5. works cited page

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Vickie Sears

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the brilliant, sonorous story of Maya Angelou's early life in Arkansas and

California. At the age of five, Maya and her brother Bailey are taken to St. Louis to visit their mother, but after Maya is raped they are returned to the rock-hard loving care of their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya stops speaking for five years but becomes a keen observer of everything around her, including the racial politics and divisions of her town. In a subtle maneuver between grandmother Henderson and Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "aristocrat of Black Stamps," Maya "got to know the lady who threw me my first life line." Mrs. Flowers tells the silent child: "Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning." So begins the reawakening of

Maya's voice and her own music. She survives adolescence, breaks a racial barrier in seeking work, becomes a mother, and closes what is the beginning of a wondrous series of autobiographical works. A consummate poet, Maya Angelou creates phrases like "voices rubbed together," "Bailey looped his language around his tongue," and "knapsack of misery" as she writes of pain, self-discovery, and, most lovingly, of joy. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's

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Superbly told--with the poet's gift for language and observation, and charged with the unforgettable emotion of remembered anguish and love--this remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are unaware of.

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Maya Angelou has a very distinct style of writing. With the proper use of adjectives and descriptive analasys, she effectivly portrays her life in Stamps Arkansas without losing the reader at all, or getting caught up in herself.