Maya Angelou, the memoirist and poet whose landmark book of 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – which describes in lyrical, unsparing prose the author's girlhood in the Jim Crow South – was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died today in her home. She was 86 and lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Her death was confirmed by her longtime literary agent, Helen Brann. No immediate cause of death had been determined, but Brann said Angelou had been in frail health for some time and had had heart problems. As well-known as she was for her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, Angelou very likely received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered the inaugural poem, On the Pulse of Morning, at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation's 42nd president, who, like Angelou, had grown up poor in rural Arkansas.
In 1998, she directed the film Down in the Delta about a drug-wrecked woman who returns to the home of her ancestors in the Mississippi Delta.
In 2011, US president Barack Obama noted that his own sister was named after Angelou as he bestowed the Medal of Honour on the poet, whose dark glasses could not hide her sob of emotion.
Tom Meagher, whose wife Jill was murdered in Australia, revealed recently that every day since her death he reads a quotation by Angelou. "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." – (New York Times service/ PA)
