Written three years after the publication of and beginning immediately following the events described in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it follows Angelou, called Rita, from the ages of 17 to 19.

Angelou expands upon many themes that she started discussing in her first autobiography, including motherhood and family, racism, identity, education and literacy.

Angelou continues to discuss racism in Gather Together, but moves from speaking for all Black women to describing how one young woman dealt with it.

The book's structure, consisting of a series of episodes tied together by theme and content, parallels the chaos of adolescence, which some critics feel makes it an unsatisfactory sequel to Caged Bird.

[7] Scholar Sondra O'Neale states that the title is "a New Testament injunction for the traveling soul to pray and commune while waiting patiently for deliverance".

[8] Critic Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees: "The incidents in the book appear merely gathered together in the name of Maya Angelou"[9] Critic Hilton Als believes that the title of Gather Together may reflect its theme of how one Black woman was able to survive in the wider context of post-war America while also speaking for all Black women, and how they survived in a white-dominated society.

Her grandmother sends them to San Francisco for their safety and protection after physically punishing Rita for confronting two white women in a department store.

Back with her mother in San Francisco, Rita attempts to enlist in the Army, only to be rejected during the height of the Red Scare because she had attended the California Labor School as a young teenager.

Critic Selwyn Cudjoe stated that in Gather Together, Angelou is still concerned with the questions of what it means to be a Black female in the U.S., but focuses upon herself at a certain point in history, in the years immediately following World War II.

The book begins with a prolog describing the confusion and disillusionment of the African-American community during that time, which matched the alienated and fragmented nature of the main character's life.

[10] Angelou chooses to demonstrate Rita's narcissism in Gather Together by dropping the conventional forms of autobiography, which has a beginning, middle, and end.

[23] Gather Together, like much of African-American literature, depicts Rita's search for self-discovery, identity, and dignity in the difficult environment of racism, and how she, like other African Americans, were able to rise above it.

In Caged Bird, despite trauma and parental rejection, Rita's world is relatively secure, but the adolescent young woman in Gather Together experiences the dissolution of her relationships many times.

[27] Angelou recognizes that the mistakes she depicts are part of "the fumblings of youth and to be forgiven as such",[28] but young Rita insists that she take responsibility for herself and her child.

[29] Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the formation of female cultural identity is woven into Angelou's narrative, setting her up as "a role model for Black women".

[32] When Angelou was concerned about what her readers would think when she disclosed that she had been a prostitute, her husband Paul Du Feu encouraged her to be honest and "tell the truth as a writer".

Like writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin, Angelou did not earn a college degree and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms".

[23] Cudjoe thought this convention weakened the book's structure, stating that the events described prevented it from achieving a "complex level of significance".

[41] Cudjoe notes that Gather Together lacks the "intense solidity and moral center" found in Caged Bird, and that the strong ethics of the Black community in the rural South is replaced by the alienation and fragmentation of urban life in the first half of the twentieth century.

[41] The world that Angelou introduces her readers to in Gather Together leaves her protagonist without a sense of purpose, and as Cudjoe states, "to the brink of destruction in order to realize herself".

[41] Critic Lyman B. Hagen disagrees with Cudjoe's judgment that Angelou's second autobiography lacked a moral center, saying that even though there are many unsavory characters in the book and that their lifestyles are not condemned, the innocent Rita emerges triumphant and "evil does not prevail".

[42] McWhorter asserts that the events that Angelou describes in Gather Together and in her subsequent autobiographies require more explanation, which she does not provide, although she expects her readers to accept them on face value.

McWhorter criticizes Angelou for her decisions in Gather Together, and for not explaining them fully, and states, "The people in these flamboyant tales—the narrator included—have a pulp-novel incoherence".

Angelou's style in Gather Together is more mature and simplified, which allows her to better convey emotion and insight through, as McPherson described it, "sharp and vivid word images".