Dr. Maya Angelou was an American author, poet, producer and civil rights activist. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, an April 4, 1928. After a turbulent childhood, Angelou started her career as a singer and dancer in San Francisco, specializing in Calypso music in the early 1950s. In 1951, she married a white man of Greek descent; a bold move, considering the disapproval of interracial marriages in the United States during that time.
After her divorce in 1954, Maya Angelou won a role in the operetta, Porkey and Bess. While on tour in Europe, she began learning the language of every country the show visited. At the end of the tour, May Angelou was proficient in several languages. She returned to the United States and starred in an off-Broadway show, signing most of her own songs. This show would become the basis for the 1957 film, Calypso Heat Wave.
In 1959, May Angelou’s direction in life changed. That was the year she met author John Oliver Killens and he encouraged her to write. This was also the time when she started her activism in the Civil Rights Movement, after meeting Martin Luther King, Jr. Angelou worked for a time in Egypt for the English-speaking newspaper The Arab Observer and became friends with Malcolm X during his visit there.
During the 1960s and 70s, she wrote poems, had roles in film and TV, In 1969, her autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, was published. It was the first of seven autobiographies she would write over her lifetime.
Maya Angelou recited her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, at the Presidential Inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. She died on May 29, 2014, in Winston-Salem, NC. She had one son. Her net worth at the time was estimated at $10 million.
