I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The African-American writer and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.

In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there.

These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever.