FRANKLIN LIBRARY SIGNED All God's Children ANGELOU

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FRANKLIN LIBRARY MAYA ANGELOU All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes With a specially commissioned frontispiece portrait of the author by Sherilyn van Valkenburgh Beautiful Topgrain Leather Signed Limited Edition One of the "Signed First Edition Society" Collection, privately printed by the Franklin Library, and personally signed by author Maya Angelou Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis , Missouri on April 4, 1928. Her parents divorced when she was three and she and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Angelou experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old-fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life. She credits her grandmother and her extended family with instilling in her the values that informed her later life and career. She enjoyed a close relationship with her brother, who gave her the nickname Maya when they were very young. At age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother's boyfriend. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man, and fell silent for five years. Angelou began to speak again at 13, when she and her brother rejoined their mother in San Francisco. She attended Mission High School and won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco's Labor School. She dropped out of school to become San Francisco's first African American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook. In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos. When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou, combining her childhood nickname with a form of her husband's name. Although the marriage did not last, Angelou’s performing career flourished - she toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955, studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady (1957). In the late 1950s, Angelou moved to New York, w she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and took her place among the growing number of young black writers and artists associated with the Civil Rights Movement. In New York, she fell in love with the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make and in 1960, the couple moved, with Angelou's son, to Cairo. In Egypt, Angelou served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer . Angelou and Guy later moved to Ghana, joining a thriving group of African American expatriates. She served as an instructor and assistant administrator at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company. During her years abroad, Angelou read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. She met with the American dissident leader Malcolm X in his visits to Ghana, and corresponded with him as his thinking evolved from the racially polarized politics of his youth to the more inclusive vision of his maturity. Angelou returned to America in 1964 with the intention of helping Malcolm X build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and his plans for a new organization died with him. Angelou worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther Kin... read more

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