Maya Angelou (born 1928)--author, poet, playwright, stage and screen performer, and director--is best known for her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), which recalls a young African American woman's discovery of her self-confidence. Ma...

Maya Angelou's literary significance rests primarily upon her exceptional ability to tell her life story as both a human being and a black American woman in the twentieth century. Five serial autobiographical volumes have been published to date (in 1969,...

Maya Angelou's literary significance rests upon her exceptional ability to tell her life story as both a human being and a black American woman in the twentieth century. Four serial autobiographical volumes have been published to date (in 1970, 1974, 197...

The parodists have it wrong. They’ve turned the phrase most identified with Greta Garbo—“I want to be alone”—into something that might have issued from Bela Lugosi. Garbo did not pronounce the “w” as a “v” (she says “want,” not “vant”); she did not declaim those...