Maya Angelou, an American author and poet who documented her life in seven autobiographies and recited her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, has died at age 86.
Angelou’s publicist told CNN that the renowned poet died at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. Mayor Allen Jones told WGHP-TV that Angelou was found by her caretaker on Wednesday morning.
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The news comes days after Angelou canceled a planned appearance at the MLB Beacon Awards Luncheon in Houston, where she was set to honored on May 30. The MLB cited “health reasons” for her absence, and in April Angelou canceled an event in Arkansas because she was recovering from an “unexpected ailment.”
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Tall and regal, with a deep, majestic voice, Angelou defied all probability and category, becoming one of the first black women to enjoy mainstream success as an author and thriving in virtually every artistic medium. The young single mother who performed at strip clubs to earn a living later wrote and recited the most popular presidential inaugural poem in history. The childhood victim of rape wrote a million-selling memoir, befriended Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and performed on stages around the world.
An actress, singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s, she broke through as an author in 1970 with “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” which became standard (and occasionally censored) reading, and was the first of a multipart autobiography that continued through the decades. In 1993, she was a sensation reading her cautiously hopeful “On the Pulse of the Morning” at former President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. Her confident performance openly delighted Clinton and made the poem a best-seller, if not a critical favorite. For former President George W. Bush, she read another poem, “Amazing Peace,” at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House.
She remained close enough to the Clintons that in 2008 she supported Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy over the ultimately successful run of the country’s first black president, Barack Obama. But a few days before Obama’s inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she would be watching it on television “somewhere between crying and praying and being grateful and laughing when I see faces I know.”
She was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended when Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared on her friend’s talk show program. She mastered several languages and published not just poetry, but advice books, cookbooks and children’s stories. She wrote music, plays and screenplays, received an Emmy nomination for her acting in “Roots,” and never lost her passion for dance, the art she considered closest to poetry.
“The line of the dancer: If you watch (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and you see that line, that’s what the poet tries for. The poet tries for the line, the balance,” she told The Associated Press in 2008, shortly before her birthday.
Her very name as an adult was a reinvention. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis and raised in Stamps, Ark., and San Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents and her grandmother. She was smart and fresh to the point of danger, packed off by her family to California after sassing a white store clerk in Arkansas. Other times, she didn’t speak at all: At age 7, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and didn’t speak for years. She learned by reading, and listening.
“I loved the poetry that was sung in the black church: ‘Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land,'” she told the AP. “It just seemed to me the most wonderful way of talking. And ‘Deep River.’ Ooh! Even now it can catch me. And then I started reading, really reading, at about 7 1/2, because a woman in my town took me to the library, a black school library. … And I read every book, even if I didn’t understand it.”
At age 9, she was writing poetry. By 17, she was a single mother. In her early 20s, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel, was married (to Enistasious Tosh Angelos, her first of three husbands) and then divorced. By her mid-20s, she was performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing with another future star, Phyllis Diller. She spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who was kind enough to sing a lullaby to Angelou’s son Guy, surly enough to heckle her off the stage and astute enough to tell her: “You’re going to be famous. But it won’t be for singing.”
After renaming herself Maya Angelou for the stage (“Maya” was a childhood nickname), she toured in “Porgy and Bess” and Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” and danced with Alvin Ailey. She worked as a coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Malcolm X and remained close to him until his assassination, in 1965. Three years later, she was helping King organize the Poor People’s March in Memphis, Tenn., where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou’s 40th birthday.
She also tinkered with a career in music. In 1957 she recorded an album of calypso songs for Scamp Records. Titled “Miss Calypso,” the album’s cover featured Angelou posing over a fire while wearing a sexy red dress. Songs included standards like “Run Joe” and “Calypso Blues” as well as five originals written by Angelou. The album was generally well-received, with Billboard applauding Angelou’s “finesse” and noting she “has enough sell in her voice to offer dealers a promising set.”
It turned out to be her first and only album of music. Listen to “Run Joe”:
President Obama presented Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She also won three Grammy awards for best spoken word album. Her first came in 1993 for “On the Pulse of the Morning.” She won again two years later for her poem “Phenomenal Woman.” In 2002 the Recording Academy honored her with a third Grammy, for the audio book of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven.”
In 2011, Angelou was embroiled in a disagreement with the rapper Common over his use of the n-word in his song “The Dreamer,” which she recited a poem.
Angelou told the New York Post that she “had no idea that Common was using the piece we had done together on [a track] in which he also used the ‘N’ word numerous times.” She also called the word “vulgar and dangerous” to the black community. The disagreement, however, was apparently squashed as the two discussed the issue and agreed to disagree.
In recent years, Angelou became active on Twitter. Her final message to followers was published on May 23.
Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.
— Maya Angelou (@DrMayaAngelou) May 23, 2014