I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New Windmills)

This title comes from one of a series offering classic and contemporary fiction and other literary work for schools, to suit a range of ages and tastes. Maya Angelou's autobiographical account of her childhood and early youth in 1930s America is an evocation of a black girl's struggle against her oppressors.

In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."