Maya Angelou as a Caged Bird Essay -- Biography Biographies Essays

Maya Angelou as a Caged Bird The graduation pic from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings illustrates how, living in the center of racism and unequal access to opportunity, Maya Angelou was suitable to surmount the obstacles that stood in her panache of intellectual develop and find higher ground. One of the largest factors responsible for Angelous academician success was her dedication to and capacity for severely work, My work alone has awarded me a top place...No absences, no tardinesses, and my academic work was among the best of the year (Angelou 13-14). Angelou worked hard and read a great deal in order to be able to perform on such a level, in cattiness of the fact that she had much less access (or none) to the quality of teachers, school surroundings and other resources available to whites because of her color. Another way Angelou surmounted the disadvantages of being raw in a racist white controlled school district was to peck her brother as a percentage model. She i s proud that she can itemise the preamble to the Constitution faster than Bailey, she is proud he will go across her graduate at the top of her class, and he provides her with literature which fuels her desire to read. Maya to a fault used other students in her class who were intelligent as role models and a measure stick of her declare performance. She admires the class valedictorian, Henry Reed, because he has been her most ch all(prenominal)enging academic competition among her peers. However, another reason Angelou is able to overcome obstacles and reach higher ground is that she is not jealous or mean-spirited about academically competing with others. Instead, she is happy that others are developing towards higher ground. As she says about Henry, I had admired him for years because e... ...race (Angelou 21). Angelou knows she would let down all those who have struggled and given her encouragement if she did not rise above the limitations of her own time and place. WORK CITE D Angelou, M. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. In Eastman, A. M. The Norton Anthology of Expository Prose. (3rd edit.) W.W. Norton & Co., NY 1973. The student may wish to begin the paper with the pursuit quote I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into smell simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such moving wonder, such a luminous dignity. I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood, when the people in books were more solid than the people one saw every day, have I demonstrate myself so moved. Her portrait is a Biblical study of life in the midst of death. James Baldwin