Yet that was just the beginning of a traumatic childhood, as the girl would recall in her most famous work,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As a young black woman growing up in the South, and later, in war-time San Francisco, Johnson (who changed her name to Maya Angelou at the beginning of her stage career) faced racism from whites and poor treatment from most men (she was raped when she was seven years old). She found that, in this position, she had few career options, and little chance of leading a fruitful life; she gave birth out of wedlock at seventeen, experimented with drugs, and worked as a madam and prostitute. Instead of letting forces beyond her control overcome her, Angelou began to forge art from her early experiences and change the world as she'd once known it. She became a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and director (Hollywood's first female black director). She became a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, poet, and screenplay-writer. She became known, as Annie Gottlieb wrote in the New York Times Book Review, as a person who "writes like a song, and like the truth.
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