I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Author	Maya Angelou
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Autobiography
Publisher	Bantam (April 1, 1983)
Publication date	1969
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	289 pp (Mass Market Paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-5533-27937-8
Followed by	Gather Together in My Name

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography about the early years, from the ages of 3 to 16, of author Maya Angelou's life. The book's title is taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. It begins with the abandonment of young Maya and her older brother, whose parents send them by train to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother, and ends with Maya's entrance into adulthood by becoming a mother.

Written at the end of American Civil Rights movement, the book was inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed on Angelou's birthday (April 4) in 1968.^[1] Angelou was "tricked" into writing it by her friend James Baldwin and her editor, Robert Loomis, who gave her the challenge of writing autobiography as literature. Although Caged Bird is classified as an autobiography and is written in the first-person narrative, it has many fictional aspects, causing some critics to classify it as an autobiographical novel.

Angelou's book explores the themes of identity, racism, and literacy. The author uses her coming-of-age story to illustrate the ways in which racism and trama can be overcome by a strong character and a love of literature. Its graphic depiction of childhood rape, racism, and sexuality have resulted in the books being banned by many libraries and parents groups. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, and remained on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for two years.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first in a six-volume autobiographical series, covering Angelou's childhood and young adult experiences. 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).

Contents 1 Explanation of the book's title 2 Publication 3 Plot summary 4 Main characters in Caged Bird 4.1 Marguerite Johnson ("Maya") 4.2 Annie Henderson ("Momma") 4.3 Bailey Johnson, Jr. 4.4 Uncle Willie 4.5 Vivian Baxter Johnson 4.6 Bailey Johnson, Sr. 4.7 Mr. Freeman 4.8 Mrs. Bertha Flowers 5 Minor characters 6 Literary significance 7 Themes 7.1 Caged Bird as autobiography 7.2 Identity 7.3 Racism 7.4 Literacy 8 Criticism 9 Notes 10 References

[edit] Explanation of the book's title

The title of the book comes from the poem "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,

When he beats his bars and would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings -

I know why the caged bird sings. (Stanza 3)

[edit] Publication

In 1968, deeply depressed about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angelou had a meeting with her friend James Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and Feiffer's wife Judy. The following day Judy Feiffer called Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House and gave him the idea of Angelou writing her autobiography. At first, Angelou refused, since she considered herself a poet and playwright,^[2] but as she reported, he "tricked" her into it by "daring" her, "It’s just as well, because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible".^[1] Not being able to "resist a challenge",^[2] the result was Caged Bird, which received a National Book Award nomination ^[3] and catapulted Angelou to international fame, critical acclaim, and "heralded the success of other now prominent [black women] writers"^[4] In 1995, Angelou's publishing company, Bantam Books, announced that the book had the broken the record (two years) for longest time spent on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List.^[5]

[edit] Plot summary

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (later called My, or Maya, by her brother) life from the age of three to sixteen and the struggles she experiences in the racist South. Abandoned by their parents at an early age, she and her older brother, Bailey, are sent to live with their paternal grandmother ("Momma") and crippled uncle ("Uncle Willie") in Stamps, Arkansas, where her grandmother, a smart, religious, and entrepreneural woman, operates a general store, the center of activities in the black part of town. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book. They travel alone and are labeled like baggage.

Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the prejudices and blatant racism of her white neighbors who treat her family at the best with cool respect and, at the worst, blatant contempt. Despite the fact that Momma is wealthier, the white children of their town hassle them insolently, one girl even revealing her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident. Early in the book (chapter three), Momma has to hide Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders. Maya experiences many other instances of racism: enduring the insult of her name being shortened to "Mary" by a racist employer; a white speaker at Maya's eighth grade graduation ceremony who disparages the black audience by implying their limited job opportunities; and a white dentist's refusal to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him of a previous loan. Even when the black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of victory for their race, when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis' championship fight, they feel oppressed by racism.

A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps, where his big city ways impress the small town. He takes them with him when he leaves after three weeks, but brings them to their mother in St. Louis. While there, eight-year old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. There is a trial, and Mr. Freeman is found guilty, but he escapes jail time and is later murdered, probably by her uncles. This burdens Maya with guilt and causes her to withdraw from everyone but her brother. Even after being sent back to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps",^[6] who supplies her with books to encourage her love of reading, and coaxes her out of her shell.

Finally, when her brother Bailey is disturbed by the discovery of the corpse of a black man that some white men force he and other black men to disrespect by putting it in the town jail, Momma decides to move the children to live permanently with their mother in San Francisco, California. Maya attends the George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she breaks the race barrier and becomes the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Maya visits her father in southern California one summer; she drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from a short excursion to Mexico and experiences homelessness for a short time, after a fight with her father's girlfriend.

Maya enters adolescence, but not without awkwardness. She becomes worried that she might be a lesbian (which she equates with being a hermaphrodite), and initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy she knows only vaguely to dispel this fear. She becomes pregnant, which on the advice of her brother, she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school. Marguerite gives birth to a baby boy at the end of the book and begins her journey to adulthood by accepting her role as a mother to her newborn son.

[edit] Main characters in Caged Bird

[edit] Marguerite Johnson ("Maya")

Maya is the main character of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from whose perspective the story is told. She goes from early childhood, when at the age of three, she and her older brother Bailey are sent to their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, until she was sixteen, when she gives birth to her son Clyde. Through the character of Maya, Angelou uses her own childhood to demonstrate how she was able to survive as a black child in a white-dominated world. Maya is resilient, highly intelligent, and loves literature. She goes from feeling shame about her race and appearance to feeling pride, in spite of experiences of racism and trauma. She is raped at the age of eight by her mother's boyfriend and responds by choosing not to speak for five years, when she is brought out of her muteness by Mrs. Bertha Flowers, who introduces her to great literature.

[edit] Annie Henderson ("Momma")

Maya and Bailey's paternal grandmother, "a church-going, God-fearing woman whose store is the heart of black socializing in Stamps".^[7] She is the most important influence in Maya's life. Momma deals with racism by submitting to it without a struggle and by developing "a strategy of obedience",^[8] believing that to do any differently would be unsafe. Momma is tall, over six feet, and is very strong physically. She is wise, hard-working, and a good businesswoman.

[edit] Bailey Johnson, Jr.

Maya's brother, Bailey is a year older than her. He has the most influence on Maya's childhood. "He is bright, clever, and good-spirited".^[9] He was often her strongest supporter and ally. Maya measures others by her small-framed brother, who was her hero and "Kingdom Come".^[10] Maya and Bailey have an intense bond, and enjoy their private world of jokes. She is strengthened by his love and support; he is the only one able to comfort her after her rape, and becomes her voice when they return to Stamps. When he witnesses the murder of a black man by a group of white men, he is confused and unable to understand their hatred.

[edit] Uncle Willie

Maya and Bailey's uncle and Annie Henderson's son, he was crippled at the age of three when a babysitter dropped him. He walks with a cane. Early in Caged Bird, Momma hides him in a bin of potatoes and onions to avoid being detected by the Ku Klux Klan. He helps Momma run her store and shows Maya kindness to the point that she wishes that he could be her father. He is just as strict as Momma, however, beating Maya and Bailey after they disrupt a church service and threatening to burn her on a potbelly stove for not learning her multiplication tables.

[edit] Vivian Baxter Johnson

Maya and Bailey's mother, Maya is in awe of her beauty: she is "too beautiful to have children". ^[11] Vivian captivates both her children with her worldiness and elation, especially Bailey. Maya is emotionally separated from her mother. Angelou stated later in her life that she recognized that her mother had abandoned her and her brother, which meant that Vivian was "a terrible parent of young children".^[12] She is concerned about providing for her children, but negligent towards them. When Maya becomes pregnant at the end of the book, Vivian accepts Maya and her child; it is the birth of her grandson that causes a connection between mother and daughter.

[edit] Bailey Johnson, Sr.

Maya and Bailey's father: "He represents the absent father, the man who is not there for his children, literally and figuratively".^[13] He is tall and handsome, attempts to portray importance, but speaks in a halting manner. He is insensitive towards his children. He appears twice in Caged Bird, when he shows up in Stamps to drive his children to St. Louis, and when Maya visits him for a summer in San Diego.

[edit] Mr. Freeman

Vivian Baxter's boyfriend, he lives with Vivian and her family in St. Louis when Maya and Bailey are sent there to be with their mother. At first, he is a father substitute for Maya, who is hungry to be accepted by a male. He takes advantage of this by raping her, when she is eight years old, and then threatens to kill Bailey if she told anyone about it. Bailey encourages Maya to disclose what has happened, and Mr. Freeman goes to trial. He is found murdered, probably by Maya's uncles. Maya is so devastated and traumatized, she chooses to not speak for five years.

[edit] Mrs. Bertha Flowers

The "aristocrat of Stamps",^[14] Mrs. Flowers is a "self-supporting, independent, graceful"^[15] black woman. She gently nurses Maya out of her mutism by reading to her and by loaning her books that inspire Maya to speak again.

[edit] Minor characters

There are a number of minor characters in Caged Bird, members of the black and white community that fill out Maya's world and inform her influences and early experiences. Among the most notable are:

• Sister Monroe. A member of the black church in Stamps. She is not always able to come to services, but when she does, she shouts as loud as possible to make up for her absences. Many humorous church-related anecdotes focus on her and her behavior.
• Reverend Thomas. A "repulsive church official"^[16] that visits Stamps four times a year. Maya and Bailey depise him because he is obese and never remembers their names, and because he eats the best chicken pieces at Sunday dinner. One Sunday, Sister Monroe is so inspired by his preaching that she hits him over the head with her purse; his teeth fall out and onto the floor near Maya, which results in Maya and Bailey's uncontrollable laughter and subsequent beating by Uncle Willie.
• Mr. McElroy. Momma's neighbor, and the only black man Maya has seen whose trousers match his jackets. She and Bailey admire him because he does not go to church, which makes him "courageous".^[17]
• "Powhitetrash" girls. Three white rural girls who seeks to humiliate Momma in front of her store by taunting them and exposing themselves to her. Momma reacts by passively humming a spiritual, while Maya, watching from inside the store, weeps with shame and humiliation.
• Dentist Lincoln. A white dentist who refuses to treat Maya's tooth pain, in spite of his debt to Momma, incurred during the Great Depression. He states that he would rather put his "hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's".^[18] Momma reacts to this with passivity, while Maya is horrified and dreams up an elaborate fantasy about Momma threatening the racist dentist.
• Mrs. Viola Cullinan. Maya's employer when she is ten years old. She insists upon calling her "Mary" or "Margaret". Maya is unable to tolerate this because "whites called black people too many other names",^[19] so Maya deliberately tries to get fired. She finally succeeds by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's prized china.
• Mr. Donleavy. A white man, he is the guest speaker at Maya's eighth grade graduation. He puts a pall over the ceremony and crushes the educational dreams of the audience by insinuating that black students are only capable of becoming athletes.
• Henry Reed. The valedictorian of Maya's eighth grade class. He makes up for Mr. Donleavy's discouragement by leading the audience in "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing", the "Negro national anthem".^[20]
• Miss Kirwin. Maya's teacher at George Washington High School in San Francisco. "A rare educator",^[21] she is white but shows no favoritism to her students based upon their race. Angelou states that she is "the only teacher I remembered",^[22] and probably the only white person who befriended her.
• Baxter Family. When Maya and Bailey are sent to live with her mother when they are eight and nine, they stay with her family in St. Louis. Grandmother Baxter, Vivian's mother, is a neighborhood precinct leader of German/black descent who has connections with the local police. Tutti, Tom, and Ira are Vivian's brothers; they allegedly murder Mr. Freeman after he rapes Maya.
• Dolores. Bailey Sr.'s girlfriend, who becomes jealous of Maya. After a violent argument, Maya runs away from her father's home and is homeless for a short while.

[edit] Literary significance

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been called Maya Angelou's "magnum opus" and "a modern classic among young adult and adult readers."^[23] Poet James Bertolino asserts that Caged Bird "is one of the essential books produced by our culture, and we should all read it, especially our children."^[24] It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970^[23]; in 1995, Angelou's publishing company, Bantam Books, recognized her for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list.^[25] One of Caged Bird's most outspoken praises comes from James Baldwin, Angelou's friend and mentor: "This testimony from a black sister marks the beginning of an era in the minds and hearts and lives of all black men and women ... Her portrait is a Biblical study of life in the midst of death."^[23]

[edit] Themes

[edit] Caged Bird as autobiography

Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language often result in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction. Feminist scholar Mary Jane Lupton believes that it is useful to label Caged Bird as a Bildungsroman, or "coming-of-age" story and compares it to George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.^[26] Scholar Joanne M. Braxton sees Caged Bird as "representative of autobiographies written by black women in the post-civil rights era".^[27] Angelou characterizes her works as autobiographies,^[28] but as feminist scholar Maria Lauret stated, Angelou has placed herself in this genre while critiquing it.^[29]

As with most autobiographies, Angelou uses the first-person narrative voice, in spite of its fiction-like aspects, told from the perspective of a child that is "artfully recreated by an adult narrator".^[30] Caged Bird presents themes that are common in autobiography by black American women: the celebration of black motherhood, the criticism of racism, the importance of family, and the quest for self-sufficiency, personal dignity, and self-definition.^[31] Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth", ^[32] which parallels the conventions of much of African American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of US history, when the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection.^[33][34] At the same time, however, Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a black female, at some points a child and other points a mother.^[35]

The challenge for much of African-American literature is that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature before it could accomplish its political goals, which is why Robert Loomis was able to to dare Angelou into writing Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art".^[2] According to Angelou, her friend James Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology".^[36] When she wrote the book at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted feature of literature at the time was thematic unity, and one of her goals was to create a book that satisfied that criteria. The events in her books are crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements do not follow a strict chronology. Instead, they are placed to emphasize the themes of her books. Scholar Pierre A. Walker believes that Angelou succeeded, in spite of the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative. ^[2]

[edit] Identity

Angelou and other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s have used the autobiography to restructure the ways to write about women's lives in a male-dominated society. There is a connection between the autobiographies Angelou has written and fictional first-person narratives; they can be called "fictions of subjectivity" and "feminist first-person narratives"^[37] because they employ the narrator as protagonist and "rely upon the illusion of presence in their mode of signification".^[38] In the course of Caged Bird, Angelou goes from experiencing an inferiority complex, an identity crisis, and the victim of racism to someone who knows who she is and feels pride, and able to respond to racism with dignity.^[2]

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".^[39] Lauret agrees with other scholars that Angelou reconstructs the Black woman's image, and that Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities in her books to "signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history".^[40] Angelou begins this technique in her first autobiography, and continues it in her subsequent volumes, especially her demonstration of the "racist habit" ^[41] of renaming African Americans in Caged Bird, as shown when Maya's white employer insists on calling her "Mary". According to scholar Sidonie Ann Smith, this oversight emphasizes Maya's feelings of inadequacy and denigrates her identity, individuality, and uniqueness. Maya understands this in the book, and rebels by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's favorite dish.^[42]

Maya's rape at the age of eight is a significant incident that marks her identity. In Caged Bird, rape is "a concept so forceful that it overcomes the autobiography, even though it is presented fairly briefly in the text".^[43] Scholar Mary Vermillion compares Angelou's treatment of rape to Harriet Jacob's in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of their race, but while Jacobs uses it to critique slaveholding culture, Angelou at first internalizes the somatophobia in twentieth-century racist conceptions of the black female body, and then challenges it.^[44] Rape "represents the black girl's difficulties in controlling, understanding, and respecting both her body and her words".^[45] Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words by the depiction of her self-imposed, five-year long silence after Mr. Freeman's rape trial and murder.^[46] As Angelou stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk".^[47]

Another incident that solidifies Maya's identity is her trip to Mexico with her father, when she had to drive a car, something she had never done before, in order to return to California. For the first time and contrasted with her experience in Stamps, Maya is "totally in control of her fate".^[48] Maya recognizes the importance of this incident, as well as the incident that immediately follows it, her short period of homelessness after arguing with her father's girlfriend. These two incidences give Maya a knowledge of self-determination and confirms her self-worth.^[49]

"Kinship concerns" find themselves throughout Caged Bird.^[50] African American literature scholar Dolly McPherson believes that Angelou's concept of family throughout her books must be understood in the light of the way in which she and her older brother were displaced by their parents at the beginning of Caged Bird.^[51] Being sent away from their parents constituted a psychological rejection, something that as young children, was internalized and interpreted as "a rejection of self".^[52] This rejection also resulted in a loss of self for Maya and Bailey, as well as a quest for love, acceptance, and self-worth.^[53]

Beginning in Caged Bird, when Maya becomes a mother at the end of the book, motherhood is a "prevailing theme"^[54] in all of Angelou's autobiograhies.^[54] Lupton believes that Angelou's plot construction and character development were influenced by this mother/child motif found in the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Jessie Fauset.^[55] Scholar Mary Burgher believes that black women autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers of "breeder and matriarch" and have presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".^[56]

[edit] Racism

Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem as a "central image" throughout her series of autobiographies.^[57][58] Like elements within the prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's imprisonment from the racism inherent in Stamps, Arkansas, and her continuing experiences of other forms of imprisonment, like racial discrimination, drugs, marriage, and the economic system.^[59] This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle".^[58]

French writer Valérie Baisnée puts Angelou's autobiographies in the midst of literature written during and about the American Civil Rights movement.^[60] Lupton states that Caged Bird "captures the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans".^[61] Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the black community of Stamps, her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society, something she is not able to articulate for many years, when she finally writes the book. Angelou also vividly presents racist characters "so real one can feel their presence".^[62] Her early experiences with racism are so powerful, that in 1982, during an interview with Bill Moyers in Stamps, she is unable to cross some railroad tracks into the white part of town.^[63] Critic Pierre A. Walker characterizes Angelou's book as political; he emphasizes that the unity of her autobiographies serves to underscore one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it.^[2] Walker also states that Angelou's biographies, beginning with Caged Bird, consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression".^[2] This sequence leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest"^[2] throughout all six of her autobiographies.

Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives Caged Bird its internal thematic unity. The book, like most autobiographies, begins with Angelou's earliest memories, but she relates events non-chronologically. For example, her description of the "powhitetrash" girls that taunt her grandmother occurs in chapter five, when Maya was about ten years old, two years after her rape, which occurs in chapter 12. Maya reacts to the "powhitetrash" incident with "rage, indignation, humiliation, [and] helplessness",^[2] but Mama teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism. Walker calls this a "strategy of subtle resistance",^[2] and McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance".^[64] Later chapters in Caged Bird demonstrate the limitations of subtle resistance, but Angelou shows that it serves as a basis for later moving to actively protesting and combating racism. She presents other ways of responding to racism, like when Maya broke the race barrier and became the first black street-car operator, Angelou's description of her eighth-grade graduation, the insensitive treatment of Maya by her white employer, and the dentist scene.^[2] As Walker states, "Momma's type of resistance was fine in its time and place, but now it is time for some real action".^[2]

[edit] Literacy

All of Angelou's autobiographies, especially this volume and the one that follows it, Gather Together in My Name, is "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it".^[65] Lupton compares Angelou's informal education with the education of other black writers of the 20th century whom did not earn a college degree and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms".^[66] Angelou is influenced by the writers Mrs. Flowers introduced her to during her period of muteness following her rape, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare (Angelou states, early in Caged Bird, that she "met and fell in love with William Shakespeare"),^[67] and by genres like slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and other autobiographies.^[68] Critic Mary Vermillon makes a connection between Angelou's rape and Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece," which Angelou memorizes when she regains her speech, maintaining that Angelou finds comfort in the poem's identification with suffering.^[69]

The power of words is another theme that appears repeatedly in Caged Bird. For example, Angelou chooses to not speak after her rape, afraid of the distructive power of words, but Mrs. Flowers, by introducing her to classic literature and poetry, teaches her about the positive power of words. This is what empowers Angelou to speak again.^[2] As McPherson says, "If there is one stable element in Angelou's youth it is [a] dependence upon books".^[70] The public library is a refuge for Maya, and when she experiences crisis, she retreats there.^[71]

[edit] Criticism

In her 1999 essay, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read", author Francine Prose criticized Caged Bird as "manipulative melodrama"^[72] and "overrated".^[73]

Caged Bird has been criticized by many parents, causing its removal from school curriculum and library shelves. "Parents, schools and related organizations have argued that the book encourages deviant behavior because of its references to lesbianism, premarital sex, cohabitation, pornography and violence."^[74] Censors have also been critical of its "sexually explicit scenes, foul language, and irreverent religious depictions."^[75] As a result, Caged Bird has been the frequent target of censors and appears third on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.^[76] The book appears fifth on the ALA's list of the ten most challenged books of 21st century (2000-2005).^[77]

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Angelou, Maya (1969). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50789-2
• Baisnée, Valérie (1994). Gendered resistance: The autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-0109-7
• Bertolino, James (1996). "Maya Angelou is three writers". In Modern critical interpretations: Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings, Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-7910-4773-3
• Braxton, Joanne M. (2004). "Black autobiography". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings, Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-7910-7562-1
• Burgher, Mary (1979). "Images of self and race in the autobiographies of black women". In Sturdy Black Bridges, Roseann P. Bell, et al, ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. ISBN 0-3851-3347-2
• Foerstel, Herbert N. (2002). Banned in the U.S.A.: A reference guide to book censorship in schools and public libraries. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 1-5931-1374-9
• Lauret, Maria (1994). Liberating literature: Feminist fiction in America. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-4150-6515-1
• Lupton, Mary Jane (1998). Maya Angelou: A critical companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30325-8
• McPherson, Dolly A. (1990). Order out of chaos: The autobiographical works of Maya Angelou. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. ISBN 0-820411-39-6
• McPherson, Dolly A. (1999). "Initiation and self-discovery". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings: A casebook, Joanne M. Braxton, ed. New York: Oxford Press. ISBN 0-1951-1606-2
• Moyer, Homer E. (2003). The R.A.T. real-world aptitude test: Preparing yourself for leaving home. Sterling, VA: Capital Books. ISBN 1-931868-42-5
• Smith, Sidonie Ann (2004). "Angelou's quest for self-acceptance". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings, Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-7910-7562-1
• Vermillion, Mary (1999). "Reimbodying the self: Representations of rape in Incidents in the life of a slave girl and I know why the caged bird sings". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings: A casebook, Joanne M. Braxton, ed. New York: Oxford Press. ISBN 0-1951-1606-2
• Vermillion, Mary (2004). "Angelou's representations of rape". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings, Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 0-7910-7562-1