The Heart of a Woman.

ANGELOU, Maya.

Item Number: 4264

New York: Random House, 1981.

First edition of the fourth volume in Angelou’s acclaimed autobiographies. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed “Joy Maya Angelou” on the half-title page. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket with light wear. Jacket design by Janet Halverson.

Maya Angelou has had more lives than the proverbial cat, and in The Heart of a Woman she continues the account of her remarkable life begun in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In the first book of her bestselling autobiographical series, she describes her traumatic childhood in the small, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s. Gather Together in My Name picks up the story in the postwar years, when Maya, a single teenager with an infant son becomes, in short order, a cook, a madam, a dancer, and a prostitute. Next comes Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, an account of her twenties and her unsuccessful first marriage to a white man. The Heart of a Woman, the fourth in the series, takes us through one of the most exciting and formative periods of Angelou's amazing life: her beginnings as a writer and an activist in New York. "Angelou is one of the geniuses of the Afro-American serial autobiography" (The New York Times).