The themes encompassed in African-American writer Maya Angelou's seven autobiographies include racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou (1928–2014) is best known for her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). The rest of the books in her series are Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013).

Beginning with Caged Bird and ending with her final autobiography, Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird (which represents the confinement of racism and depression) struggling to escape its cage, as described in the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy". Angelou's autobiographies can be placed in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Their unity underscores one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. According to scholar Pierre A. Walker, all of Angelou's books describe "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". In the course of her autobiographies, her views about Black-white relationships changed and she learned to accept different points of view. Angelou's theme of identity was established from the beginning of her autobiographies, with the opening lines in Caged Bird, and like other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Her original goal was to write about the lives of Black women in America, but it evolved in her later volumes to document the ups and downs of her own personal and professional life.

The theme of family and family relationships—from the character-defining experience of Angelou's parents' abandonment in Caged Bird to her relationships with her son, husbands, friends, and lovers—are important in all of her books. As in American autobiography generally and in African-American autobiography specifically, which has its roots in the slave narrative, travel is another important theme in Angelou's autobiographies. Scholar Yolanda M. Manora called the travel motif in Angelou's autobiographies, beginning in Caged Bird, "a central metaphor for a psychic mobility".Manora, p. 373 Angelou's autobiographies "stretch time and place",Lupton, p. 1 from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, and span almost forty years, beginning from the start of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Background

Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Maya Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965.Gillespie et al., p. 81 In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated on April 4, which also happened to be her birthday.

Angelou was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968. The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day she called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright.Walker, p. 17 According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology", and reported that Loomis tricked her into it by daring her: "It's just as well", he said, "because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible". Angelou was unable to resist a challenge, and she began writing Caged Bird.

Angelou did not write Caged Bird with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies, however critics have "judged the subsequent autobiographies in light of the first", with Caged Bird generally receiving the highest praise. Angelou's autobiographies have a distinct style, and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S. They take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's autobiographies have been characterized as autobiographical fiction, but Lupton disagrees, stating that they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.Lupton, p. 32

Angelou's use of themes, especially that of racism, connects all seven autobiographies. One of her goals, beginning with Caged Bird, was to incorporate "organic unity" into them, and the events she described were episodic, crafted like a series of short stories, and were placed to emphasize the themes of her books. Through the writing of her life stories in her autobiographies, Angelou became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. According to scholar Joanne Braxton, it made her "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".

Beginning with Caged Bird, Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years, for most of her books and poetry.Lupton, p. 15 She would get up at five in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening. Lupton stated that this ritual indicated "a firmness of purpose and an inflexible use of time". Angelou went through this process to give herself time to turn the events of her life into art, and to "enchant" herself; as she said in a 1989 interview with the BBC, to "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang". She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even during traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, to "tell the human truth" about her life. Critic Opal Moore says about Caged Bird: "...Though easily read, [it] is no 'easy read'".Moore, p. 55. Angelou stated that she played cards to reach that place of enchantment, to access her memories more effectively. She has stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!" She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".

Racism Caged Bird and Gather Together Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage described in the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy" throughout all of her autobiographies; she uses the metaphor in the titles of both I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and her sixth autobiography A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Like elements within a prison narrative, the "caged bird" represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression.Lupton, pp. 38–39 This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle". Reviewer Hilton Als observed that Angelou's witnessing of the evil in her society, as directed towards Black women, shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood. Scholar Lynn Z. Bloom asserted that Angelou's autobiographies and lectures, which she called "ranging in tone from warmly humorous to bitterly satiric", have gained a respectful and enthusiastic response from the general public and critics.

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,   When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— When he beats his bars and would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee,   But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings!— Third and final stanza of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "Sympathy".

Reviewer Daisy Aldan of World Literature Today criticized Angelou for harboring "a fanatic hostility expressed toward all white people", Quoted in Hagen, p. 3. but writer Lyman B. Hagen disagreed, stating that like Angelou's friend and mentor Langston Hughes, Angelou explained and illuminated the conditions of African Americans, but without alienating her readers of any race.Hagen, p. 4 Hagen also argued that Angelou promotes the importance of hard work, a common theme in slave narratives, throughout all her autobiographies, in order to break stereotypes of laziness associated with African-Americans.Hagen, p. 8 For instance, Angelou's description of the strong and cohesive Black community of Stamps demonstrates how African Americans have subverted repressive institutions to withstand racism.McPherson, p. 37 Angelou evolved from wishing that she could become white in Caged Bird to being "forced to contend with her blackness".

Critic Pierre A. Walker placed Angelou's autobiographies in the African-American literature tradition of political protest written in the years following the American Civil Rights Movement. He emphasized that the unity of Angelou's autobiographies underscored one of her central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird, consisted of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". This sequence led Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest". In the course of her work, Angelou changed her views about Black-white relationships and learned to accept different points of view. It was the changes in how she regarded race and her views of white people that provided Angelou with freedom. According to Hagen, one of Angelou's themes was that humans tend to be more alike than different.Hagen, p. 7 I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.— Maya Angelou, 1990 Scholar Mary Jane Lupton has called this one of Angelou's most well-known sayings.Lupton, p. 20