HEART OF A WOMAN, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in
books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I
found myself SO moved.

— James Baldwin

“Full of laughter and tears, love and hate, failures and triumphs,
and above all, understanding.”

— John O. Killens

“Gather Together in My Name

“Gather Together in My Name is part of a select body of literature
that includes The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Claude Brown’s
Manchild in the Promised land, and Ernest J. Gaines’s The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Maya Angelou regards the world
and herself with intelligence and wit; she records the events of
her life with style and grace.”

— William McPherson, The Washington Post Book World

“Here the ‘caged bird’ soars, and sings in a voice as rich and
funny, passionate and mellow as any writer I know.”

— Shana Alexander — Review

In The Heart of a Woman Maya Angelou leaves California with her
son, Guy, to go to New York. There she enters the society and world
of black artists and writers. Not since her childhood has she lived
in an almost black environment, and she is surprised at the
obsession her new friends have with the white world around them.
She stays for a while with John and Grace Killens and begins to
read her writing at the Harlem Writers Guild. She continues to
sing, most notably at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, but more and
more she begins to take part in the struggle of black Americans for
their rightful place in the world. She helps organize a benefit
cabaret for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then
is appointed Martin Luther Kings Northern Coordinator.
Shortly after that, through her friend Abbey Lincoln, she takes one
of the lead parts in Genet’s The Blacks (it was a remarkable cast,
including Godfrey Cambridge, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones,
Cicely Tyson, Raymond St. Jacques, and Lou Gossett), and even
writes music for the production.

In the meantime her personal life has taken a tempestuous turn.
She has left the New York bail bondsman she was intending to marry
and has fallen in love with a South African freedom fighter named
Vusumzi Make, who sweeps her off her feet and eventually takes her
to London and then to Cairo, where, as her marriage begins to break
up, she becomes the first female editor of the English-language
magazine.

The Heart of a Woman is filled with unforgettable vignettes of
famous people, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, but perhaps most
important is the story of Maya Angelou’s relationship with her son.
Because this book chronicles, finally, the joys and the burdens of
a black mother in America and how the son she had cherished so
intensely and worked for so devotedly finally grows to be a
man.

Poet, writer, performer, teacher and director Maya Angelou was
raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and then went to San Francisco. In
addition to her bestselling autobiographies, beginning with I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written five poetry
collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved and Shaker,
Why Don’t You Sing?, as well as the celebrated poem “On the
Pulse of Morning,” which she read at the inauguration of President
William Jefferson Clinton.