Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South

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Maya Angelou, the memoirist, poet and author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” died Wednesday. Her manuscripts are being preserved at the Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library. Credit Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

 

 Ms. Angelou in 1991, dancing with the poet Amiri Baraka, who died in January. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times 

 

Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married — it appears to have been at least three — for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)

After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence — she was six feet tall — she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.

But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.

Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.

“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”

Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start tomorrow.”