Review Of Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Roughly ten years after it was published, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was included in American high school curricula and libraries in the early 1980’s for its “insight into the personal development of a young African-American girl, its appeal to adolescent readers, its multicultural characters, and its historical significance”. That very same decade, the book was challenged in several states for “promoting premarital sex, lesbianism, cohabitation, and pornography” and for “[preaching] hatred and bitterness against whites” (Henry, 2002).

Thirty years and scores of inclusions in the American Library Association’s top banned books lists later, Caged Bird still remains one of the most banned books in America, challenged by

The social network Goodreads serves as a platform for readers to submit reviews on an extensive catalogue of books and rate their selected book according to their reading experience. Reviews of Caged Bird ranged from passionate raves to vehement rants, many of which highlight the impropriety (not of the rape act itself, but the fact that the rape was written about in the book) of Marguerite’s rape, completely discarding the positive and empowering themes in the book, such as Marguerite’s early uprisings against racism, her introduction to the beauty of literature, and her fierce pursuance of her choices and desires. One heated review from a parent named Dawn, posted in 2013, emerges as the most popular negative review and a classic example of

With books like this, this end can be achieved. As written in a tribute article to Maya Angelou in The Guardian Online, “Angelou kicked the door open so wide that within her own lifetime there existed younger people who didn't quite remember that there was ever a door there at