Emily Dickinson's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Dickinson, Emily was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, New England. She passed in 1886. Unrecognized in her own time, she is now known after her death for her unusual use of form and structure. She began writing as a teenager. In 1855, she went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and there she became friends with a minister by the name of Charles Wadsworth. In her spare time, she studied botany and produced her vast herbarium. Emily died of kidney disease Amherst, Massachusetts on May 15, 1886 at the age of 55. Little of her work was published at the time that she died. The few works that were published were edited and changed to adhere to conventional standards of the time. She was laid to rest in her family plot at West Cemetery. The homestead

She is known for her 1969 memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. She spent her childhood in California, Arkansas, and St. Louis. She lived with her paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, for most of her childhood. At sixteen she was the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. In the mid 1950’s her career as a performer began to take off. She had a very scary childhood she was always afraid and being separated from her parents. Then at the age of eight she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and as a result of this she didn’t talk for five years. At the age of sixteen she moved back to San Francisco and was able to settle down and gave birth to her son, Guy. In 1972, she was the first woman to write a screenplay and have it filmed. She wrote many poems but some of which are most popular are “I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings”, “On the Pulse of Morning”, “And I Still Rise”, “The Heart of a Woman”, and “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes”. In 1993, she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration. She was also a professor of American History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She passed away on May 24, 2014 in Winston-Salem, North