The Heart of A Woman - Background

Background

The Heart of a Woman, published in 1981, is the fourth installment of Maya Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The success of her previous autobiographies and the publication of three volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1981. And Still I Rise, her third volume of poetry, was published in 1978 and reinforced Angelou's success as a writer. Her first volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Angelou's first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings "a work of art that eludes description", states that Angelou's work set a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole. Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women through the writing of her life stories. It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton stated, "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer". Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books. Writer Hilton Als calls her a pioneer of self-exposure, willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. While Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and "be honest about it".

In 1957, the year The Heart of a Woman opens, Angelou had appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired her first film, Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions, something she does not mention in the book. Also in 1957 and not discussed in the book, her first album Miss Calypso was released; it was reissued as a CD in 1995. According to Als, Angelou sang and performed calypso music because it was popular at the time, and not to develop as an artist. As described in The Heart of a Woman, Angelou eventually gave up performing for a writing career, and became a poet and writer. According to Chuck Foster, who wrote the liner notes in Miss Calypso's 1995 reissue, her calypso music career is "given short shrift" and dismissed in the book.