Book · 1969 · Nonfiction

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Name: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Author: Maya Angelou

Ballantine Books (Penguin Random House) · 304 pages

★ 6.2 editorial score

Angelou grows up in Stamps, Arkansas, under Jim Crow and behind her grandmother's store counter. Raped at eight by her mother's boyfriend, she stops speaking for five years and reads her way back.

Genre

Autobiography and memoir Coming of age African American

Subject

Identity Racism Childhood Literature

Setting

Arkansas

Time

1969Depicts Great DepressionDepicts 1930s

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Quote · 1884

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

Mark Twain

Quote · 1871

“Prose is for ideas, Verse is for visions.”

Henrik Ibsen

Quote · 1938

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald