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Maya Angelou's Autobiography Series

This remarkable multi-volume autobiography chronicles the life journey of one of America's most influential writers and poets. Readers follow her early years marked by racism and personal trauma, her struggles for self-discovery, and her eventual triumph to literary prominence. These powerful, wise, and deeply insightful works offer an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

Mom and Me and Mom
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
The Heart of a Woman
Gather together in my name
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

    • 304 pages
    • 11 hours of reading
    4.3(497907)Add rating

    Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity.”—James Baldwin

    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4

    The Heart of a Woman

    • 352 pages
    • 13 hours of reading
    4.2(21628)Add rating

    Maya Angelou's seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. The fourth volume of her enthralling autobiography finds Maya Angelou immersed in the world of black writers and artists in Harlem, working in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King. 'She has a great capacity for love, to give, and receive it' Margaret Busby

    The Heart of a Woman
  5. 5

    All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

    • 224 pages
    • 8 hours of reading
    4.2(448)Add rating

    In 1962 the poet, musician, and performer Maya Angelou claimed another piece of her identity by moving to Ghana, joining a community of "Revolutionist Returnees" inspired by the promise of pan-Africanism. All God's Children Need Walking Shoes is her lyrical and acutely perceptive exploration of what it means to be an African American on the mother continent, where color no longer matters but where American-ness keeps asserting itself in ways both puzzling and heartbreaking. As it builds on the personal narrative of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, this book confirms Maya Angelou’s stature as one of the most gifted autobiographers of our time.

    All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
  6. 6

    A Song Flung Up to Heaven

    • 212 pages
    • 8 hours of reading
    4.3(3240)Add rating

    It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes too of 'Jimmy' Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America's most impressive memoir writers. Virago publisher says: 'Though I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings remains one of my all time best books, this final volume is fast becoming a new favourite. It's wonderful!

    A Song Flung Up to Heaven
  7. 7

    Mom and Me and Mom

    • 208 pages
    • 8 hours of reading
    4.2(21758)Add rating

    'In the first decade of the twentiety century, it was not a good time to be born black, or woman, in America.' So begins this stunning portrait of Vivian Baxter Johnson: the first black woman officer in the Merchant Marines, purveyor of a gambling business and rooming house, and mother to one of our most cherished literary treasures. Anyone who's read the classic, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, knows Maya Angelou was raised by her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away and unearths the well of emotions Angelou experienced long afterward as a result. While Angelou's six autobiographies tell of her out in the world, influencing and learning from statesmen and cultural icons, Mom &

    Mom and Me and Mom