Dec 30, 2009

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Social Concerns

Maya Angelou tries to show in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings what Stamps, Arkansas, in the 1930s was like for blacks. Segregation was so complete the tradition of novels about childhood: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce; 1916), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, 1884), Black Boy (Wright, 1945), and The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951). Black women's autobiographies that also analyze the self-image of contemporary black autobiographers include Ossie Guffy's Ossie: The Autobiography of a Black Woman (1971), Pearl Bailey's...