SOURCE: Walker, Pierre A. “Racial Protest, Identity, Words and Form in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” College Literature 22, no. 3 (October 1995): 91–109.

In the following essay, Walker evaluates the political nature and influence of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Maya Angelou has told in interviews how Robert Loomis, her eventual Random House editor, goaded her into writing autobiography, teasing her with the challenge of writing literary autobiography. Considering herself a poet and playwright, she had repeatedly refused Loomis's requests that she write an autobiography until he told her that it was just as well: “‘He … said that to write an autobiograph—as literature—is almost impossible. I said right then I'd do it’” (“Maya Angelou,” with Hitt 211). Angelou often admits that she cannot resist a challenge; however, it was not the challenge of writing autobiography per se that Angelou could not resist (and that...