Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator.

[7][8]Angelou 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.

She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon.

Although Momma is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' Black community, the white children of their town, in an "almost ritual insult",[29] hassle Maya's family relentlessly.

Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders, where he moans and groans under the potatoes throughout the night.

The Black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of racial victory when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis's championship fight, but generally, they feel the heavy weight of racist oppression.

[32] Other critics, like Mary Jane Lupton, insist that Angelou's books should be categorized as autobiographies because they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.

[49] Unlike other Black autobiographers like Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi, however, Angelou is less concerned with her book's place or setting, and instead focuses on her growing awareness of her environment.

[64] Lupton states that Angelou presents material not found in other autobiographies, written by both Black and white writers, because she addresses topics from the perspective of an African American woman.

[1] Scholar Liliane Arensberg, in her discussion about the theme of death in Caged Bird, suggests that Angelou "retaliates for the tongue-tied child's helpless pain" by using her adult self's irony and wit.

[75] Smith also states that Angelou follows the convention in Black American autobiography, especially slave narratives, which recreates the environment of enslavement and oppression at the beginning, before describing how the protagonist escapes from it.

[78] McPherson states that Angelou opens Caged Bird with the Easter poem, which she evaluates in light of the book's plot and themes, because it emphasizes its significance in her life, describes her rootlessness, and "is also a blues metaphor that foreshadows a cyclical pattern of renewal, rebirth, change in consciousness, and the circuitous journey of recovered innocence".

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

[94] McPherson also states that Angelou's statement in Caged Bird, "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.

[111] Scholar Mary Burgher believes that female Black autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers as "breeder[s] and matriarch[s]", and have presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".

[144] Also unlike Wright, Angelou recalls the larger rituals of black community, such as religious practices, the radio broadcast of the Joe Lewis fight, a summer fish fry, the telling of ghost stories, and graduation activities, favorably.

[149] For Moore, the rape "raises issues of trust, truth, and lie, love, and the naturalness of a child's craving for human contact, language and understanding, and the confusion engendered by the power disparities that necessarily exist between children and adults".

It raises issues of trust, truth and lies, love, the naturalness of a child's craving for human contact, language and understanding, and the confusion engendered by the power disparities that necessarily exist between children and adults.

[157][full citation needed] Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls Angelou's depiction of the rape "a burden" of Caged Bird: a demonstration of "the manner in which the Black female is violated in her tender years and ... the 'unnecessary insult' of Southern girlhood in her movement to adolescence".

[165] For example, one of the most traumatic experiences Angelou relates in Caged Bird is her eighth-grade graduation, when the white commencement speaker denigrates Blacks, reduces their potential to athletics, and conveys to his audience a sense of impotence and nothingness.

Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe, Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois' 'Litany at Atlanta.'

Christine Froula, though, in her discussion about incest in Caged Bird and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, points out that Maya and Bailey gave up memorizing a scene from Shakespeare to avoid their grandmother's opposition to reading a white author, choosing Johnson's "The Creation" instead.

She is so involved in her fantasy world of books that she even uses them as a way to cope with her rape,[177] writing in Caged Bird, "...I was sure that any minute my mother or Bailey or the Green Hornet would bust in the door and save me".

[note 3] Referring to the importance of literacy and methods of effective writing, Angelou once advised Oprah Winfrey in a 1993 interview to "do as West Africans do ... listen to the deep talk",[182] or the "utterances existing beneath the obvious".

[183] As Liliane Arensberg puts it, "If there is one stable element in Angelou's youth it is [a] dependence upon books" and fiction, including The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and Marvel Comics, and works by Shakespeare, Poe, Dunbar, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Samuel Johnson, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B.

[201] The week after Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, sales of the paperback version of Caged Bird, which had sold steadily since its publication, and her other works rose by 300–600 percent.

[206] Caged Bird catapulted Angelou to international fame and critical acclaim and was a significant development in Black women's literature because it "heralded the success of other now prominent writers".

[201] Edmund Fuller insists that Angelou's intellectual range and artistry were apparent in how she told her story[211] and Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls it "a triumph of truth in simple, forthright terms".

[122] Although Als considers Caged Bird an important contribution to the increase of Black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than to "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist"[59] of its time, at the end of the American Civil Rights Movement.

[222] Caged Bird elicits criticism for its honest depiction of rape, its exploration of the ugly specter of racism in America, its recounting of the circumstances of Angelou's own out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and its humorous poking at the foibles of the institutional church.