Critical reception and sales
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. The other volumes in her series of seven autobiographies are judged and compared to Caged Bird.[16] It became a bestseller immediately after it was published.[6] Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book "liberates the reader into life" and called it "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death".[171] According to Angelou's biographers, "Readers, especially women, and in particular Black women, took the book to heart".[172]
James Baldwin (1955), Angelou's friend and mentor, called Caged Bird "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death".[173]By the end of 1969, critics had placed Angelou in the tradition of other Black autobiographers. Poet James Bertolino asserts that Caged Bird "is one of the essential books produced by our culture". He insists that "[w]e should all read it, especially our children".[174] It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, has never been out of print, and has been published in many languages.[172] It has been a Book of the Month Club selection and an Ebony Book Club selection.[175] In 2011, Time Magazine placed the book in its list of 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.[176]
Critic Robert A. Gross called Caged Bird "a tour de force of language".[177] Edmund Fuller insisted that Angelou's intellectual range and artistry were apparent in how she told her story.[177] Caged Bird catapulted Angelou to international fame and critical acclaim and was a significant development in Black women's literature because it "heralded the success of other now prominent writers".[178] Other reviewers have praised Angelou's use of language in the book, including critic E. M. Guiney, who reported that Caged Bird was "one of the best autobiographies of its kind that I have read".[175] Critic R. A. Gross praises Angelou for her use of rich and dazzling images[175] and Dolly McPherson praises Angelou for describing "a life lived with intensity, honesty, and a remarkable combination of innocence and knowledge".[179] McPherson called the book "a carefully conceived record of a young girl's slow and clumsy growth" and "a record of her initiation into her world and her discovery of her interior identity". McPherson states that Angelou is able to confidently and effectively describe her painful memories.[180] Harold Bloom calls Caged Bird "more a carol than it is a prayer or plea".[40] Scholar Sidonie Ann Smith states that Angelou's "genius as a writer is her ability to recapture the texture of the way of life in the texture of its idioms, its idiosyncratic vocabulary and especially in its process of image-making".[181]
Opal Moore, in her criticism of the push to ban Caged Bird from schools, states that the book's message of overcoming racism transcends its author and that the book "is an affirmation; it promises that life, if we have the courage to live it, will be worth the struggle".[182] Scholar Liliane Arensberg states that like all autobiographies, Caged Bird "seems a conscious defense against the pain felt at evoking unpleasant memories".[58] Scholar Mary Jane Lupton compares Angelou's works with Richard Wright's two-volume serial autobiographies, stating that Angelou's transitions between her volumes are smoother than Wright's and that her presentation of herself as a character is more consistent. Lupton also compares Angelou's autobiographies with Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) by Zora Neale Hurston, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) by Anne Moody, Report From Part One (1972) by Gwendolyn Brooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) by bell hooks, and Lilian Hellman's series of four autobiographies.[183][184] Dolly McPherson says that Angelou's serial autobiographies, along with other contemporary autobiographies written by Baldwin, Moody, and Malcolm X, "is the urge to articulate, as if for the first time, a sensibility at once determined and precluded by history".[185]
The book's reception has not been universally positive; author Francine Prose considers its inclusion in the high school curriculum as partly responsible for the "dumbing down" of American society. Prose calls the book "manipulative melodrama", and considers Angelou's writing style an inferior example of poetic prose in memoir. She states that Angelou combines a dozen metaphors in one paragraph and for "obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously".[186]
By the mid-1980s, Caged Bird had gone through 20 hardback printings and 32 paperback printings.[175] The week after Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, sales of the paperback version of Caged Bird, which had sold steadily since its publication, and her other works rose by 300–600 percent. The 16-page publication of "On the Pulse of Morning" became a bestseller, and the recording of the poem was awarded a Grammy Award. The Bantam Books edition of Caged Bird was a bestseller for 36 weeks, and they had to reprint 400,000 copies of her books to meet demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, marking a 1,200 percent increase.[187][188][189]
Influence
When Caged Bird was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African-American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, Black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description",[50] has insisted that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for African-American autobiography as a whole. Als insists that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a Black autobiographer could, as Als put it, "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense".[50] After writing Caged Bird, Angelou became recognized as a respected spokesperson for blacks and women.[16] Caged Bird made her "without a doubt ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".[111] Although Als considers Caged Bird an important contribution to the increase of Black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than to "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist"[50] of its time, at the end of the American Civil Rights Movement. Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other women writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world".[50]
Opal Moore has called for better preparation for teachers who use Caged Bird in their classrooms, stating that the book is a difficult text for both teachers and students.[20] Angelou's autobiographies, especially Caged Bird, for example, have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches to teacher education. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has used Caged Bird and Gather Together in My Name when training teachers to appropriately explore racism in their classrooms. Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony causes readers to wonder what she "left out" and to be unsure how to respond to the events Angelou describes. These techniques force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their privileged status in society. Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African-American autobiography and her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".[190]
Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener states that Angelou's book provides a useful framework for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya face and how a community helps these children succeed as Angelou did.[191] Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has used Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence. He has called Caged Bird a highly effective tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.[192]
Censorship
Caged Bird elicits criticism for its honest depiction of rape, its exploration of the ugly specter of racism in America, its recounting of the circumstances of Angelou's own out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and its humorous poking at the foibles of the institutional church.
–Opal Moore[193]
Caged Bird has been criticized by many parents, causing it to be removed from school curricula and library shelves. The book was approved to be taught in public schools and was placed in public school libraries through the U.S. in the early-1980s, and was included in Advanced Placement and gifted student curriculum. Attempts by parents to censor it began in 1983. Caged Bird has been challenged in fifteen U.S. states.[194] Some have been critical of its sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions.[195] Many parents throughout the U.S. have sought to ban the book from schools and libraries for being inappropriate for younger high school students, for promoting premarital sex, homosexuality, cohabitation, and pornography, and for not supporting traditional values. Parents have also objected to the book's use of profanity and to its graphic and violent depiction of rape and racism. Educators have responded to these challenges by removing it from reading lists and libraries, by providing students with alternatives, and by requiring parental permission from students.[194] In 2009, Angelou expressed her sorrow and outrage about the banning of all her books, stating that those who insisted upon banning them had not read them. She also said, “I feel sorry for the young person who never gets to read [Caged Bird]".[196]
In 2021, the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, which stated that banning books like Caged Bird and The Color Purple by Alice Walker "points to a larger pattern of banning books significant to African American history and culture",[197] found that Caged Bird was banned in prisons throughout the U.S.; for example, the book was banned in North Carolina prisons because officials determined that its depiction of sexual assault was a security threat.[198]
Caged Bird appeared third on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000,[199] sixth on the ALA's 2000–2009 list,[200] and fell to 88th place on the ALA's 2010-2019 list.[201][163][note 5] As of 1998, it was one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms.[203]
Film version
A made-for-TV movie version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was filmed in Mississippi and aired on April 28, 1979, on CBS. Angelou and Leonora Thuna wrote the teleplay; the movie was directed by Fielder Cook. Constance Good played young Maya. Also appearing were actors Esther Rolle, Roger E. Mosley, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Madge Sinclair.[204] Two scenes in the movie differed from events described in the book. Angelou added a scene between Maya and Uncle Willie after the Joe Louis fight; in it, he expresses his feelings of redemption and hope after Louis defeats a white opponent.[205] Angelou also presents her eighth grade graduation differently in the film. In the book, Henry Reed delivers the valedictory speech and leads the Black audience in the Negro national anthem. In the movie, Maya conducts these activities.[206]
