I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Background

Background

Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as fry cook, dancer, actress, poet, educator, and even brothel madam. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She next worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated.

The assassinations were "particularly painful" for Angelou because she had agreed to work for both Malcolm X and King a few months before their deaths. King died on her birthday, so she did not celebrate it for many years. She was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968. The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day she called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright. According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology". She reported that Loomis tricked her into it by daring her: "It’s just as well", he said, "because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible". In her words, Angelou was unable to "resist a challenge", and she began writing Caged Bird. After "closeting herself", it took her two years to write it.

Although she did not intend to compose a series of autobiographies, Angelou later wrote five additional volumes, covering a variety of her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes and stretch from Arkansas to Africa, from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. Like those of Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted as a series of short stories, yet do not follow a strict chronology. Later books in the series include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002). Critics have often judged Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first", and Caged Bird generally receives the highest praise.

Angelou describes her writing process as regimented. Beginning with Caged Bird, she has used the same "writing ritual" for many years. She gets up at five in the morning and checks into a hotel room, where the staff has been instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She writes on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and leaves by the early afternoon. She averages 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening. Angelou goes through this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, to "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang". She places herself back in the time she is writing about, even during traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, to "tell the human truth" about her life. Critic Opal Moore says about Caged Bird: "... Though easily read, is no 'easy read'". Angelou has stated that she plays cards to reach that place of enchantment, to access her memories more effectively. She has stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I’m in it—ha! It’s so delicious!" She does not find the process cathartic; rather, she has found relief in "telling the truth".