Maya Angelou's six 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. 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.
'She has a great capacity for love, to give, and receive it' Margaret Busby
A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman (President Barack Obama)
The poems and stories she wrote . . . were gifts of wisdom and wit, courage and grace (President Bill Clinton)
She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds (Oprah Winfrey)
She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate (Toni Morrison)
Loving the world, Maya Angelou also knows its cruelty and offers up her autobiography as an extraordinary mixture of innocene and depravity, of elegy and celebration (NICCI GERRARD, NEW STATESMAN)
The freshness of Maya Angelou's writing is something to marvel at (PHILIP OAKES)
