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Dr. Maya Angelou’s Seven Volume Autobiographical Writing Collection

Maya Angelou Collection

‘I write about being a Black American woman, however, I am always talking about what it’s like to be a human being. This is how we are, what makes us laugh, and this is how we fall and how we somehow, amazingly, stand up again’ Maya Angelou

 

Take a closer look at the Virago Modern Classics collection of Dr. Maya Angelou’s seven volume collection of autobiographical writing. This collection includes:

 

VOLUME ONE: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

VOLUME TWO: Gather Together In My Name

VOLUME THREE: Singin’ & Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

VOLUME FOUR: The Heart of a Woman

VOLUME FIVE: All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes

VOLUME SIX: A Song Flung Up to Heaven

VOLUME SEVEN: Mom and Me and Mom

 

Maya Angelou’s seven volumes of autobiography are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.

Dr Maya Angelou
Buy all seven volumes for £65.00 via the Virago Store

This set of books take us through her extraordinary life, from the American south of the 1930s to 1964 and the precipice of change where we find Maya working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The collection is a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer.

‘A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman’ – President Barack Obama

 

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

VOLUME ONE: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s lover.

Gather Together In My Name

VOLUME TWO: Gather Together In My Name

 In the sequel to her bestselling I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou is a young mother in California, unemployed, embarking on brief affairs and transient jobs in shops and night-clubs, turning to prostitution and the world of narcotics. Maya Angelou powerfully captures the struggles and triumphs of her passionate life with dignity, wisdom, humour and humanity.

Singin’ & Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas

VOLUME THREE: Singin’ & Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas 

In this her third marvellous volume, music and her son are the focus of Maya Angelou’s life. She is on the edge of a new world: marriage, show business and a triumphant tour of Porgy and Bess.

Heart of a Woman

VOLUME FOUR: The Heart of a Woman

The fourth volume of her enthralling autobiography finds Maya Angelou immersed in the world of black writers and artists in Harlem, working in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King.

All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes

VOLUME FIVE: All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes

In the fifth volume, Maya Angelou emigrates to Ghana only to discover that ‘you can’t go home again’ but she comes to a new awareness of love and friendship, civil rights and slavery – and the myth of mother Africa.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven

VOLUME SIX: A Song Flung Up to Heaven

It is 1964, America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing. In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of ‘Jimmy’ Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America’s most impressive memoir writers.

Me and Mom, Mom and Me

VOLUME SEVEN: Mom and Me and Mom

 In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away and unearths the well of emotions Angelou experienced long afterward as a result. While Angelou’s six autobiographies tell of her out in the world, influencing and learning from statesmen and cultural icons, Mom & Me & Mom shares the intimate, emotional story about her own family.