The Heart of a Woman - Softcover

Angelou, Maya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553380095 ISBN 13: 9780553380095

Publisher: Bantam, 1997

Synopsis

This engaging book chronicles the changes in Maya Angelou's life as she enters the hub of activity that is New York.  There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, she
rededicates herself to writing, and finds love at an unexpected moment. Reflecting on her many roles--from northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest to mother of a rebellious teenage son--Angelou eloquently speaks to an awareness of the heart within us all.

About this title

Review

Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, May 1997: Maya Angelou has had more lives than the proverbial cat, and in The Heart of a Woman she continues the account of her remarkable life begun in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In the first book of her bestselling autobiographical series, she describes her traumatic childhood in the small, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s. Gather Together in My Name picks up the story in the postwar years, when Maya, a single teenager with an infant son becomes, in short order, a cook, a madam, a dancer, and a prostitute. Next comes Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, an account of her twenties and her unsuccessful first marriage to a white man. The Heart of a Woman, the fourth in the series, takes us through one of the most exciting and formative periods of Angelou's amazing life: her beginnings as a writer and an activist in New York.

Angelou has a happy knack of attracting the best and the brightest into her orbit, and The Heart of a Woman offers a veritable cornucopia of black luminaries in its pages. Singer Billie Holiday, writers John Ellins and Paule Marshall, jazz musicians Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and actors Godfrey Cambridge and James Earl Jones--Maya meets and learns from them all. Political activism soon follows as Ms. Angelou first organizes a theatrical benefit for the Reverend Martin Luther King and then becomes the director of the New York Southern Christian Leadership Conference office. Her involvement in the civil rights movement eventually brings her into contact with African freedom fighters Oliver Tambo and the charming Vusumzi Make, whom she marries and follows to Africa.

The Heart of a Woman is as honest, painful, funny, outraged, and outrageous as Angelou herself. From her debut at the Apollo Theatre to her meeting with Malcolm X, Maya Angelou gives us something to cheer about and plenty to ponder as well.

From the Back Cover

"I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself SO moved."

-- James Baldwin

"Full of laughter and tears, love and hate, failures and triumphs, and above all, understanding."

-- John O. Killens

"Gather Together in My Name

"Gather Together in My Name is part of a select body of literature that includes The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised land, and Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Maya Angelou regards the world and herself with intelligence and wit; she records the events of her life with style and grace."

-- William McPherson, The Washington Post Book World

"Here the 'caged bird' soars, and sings in a voice as rich and funny, passionate and mellow as any writer I know."

-- Shana Alexander

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0553380095
• ISBN 13: 9780553380095
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336