It’s the birthday of Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928, poet, novelist, playwright, performer, and author of seven volumes of autobiography, including her first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

This first volume describes her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou’s parents divorced when she was young, and Angelou and her brother Bailey, one year older, were largely raised by her paternal grandmother. When she was seven or eight, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and told Bailey, who told the family. The boyfriend was convicted but then murdered (probably by her uncles). Angelou went mute for several years.

Angelou became a single mom at 16 and worked a vast array of jobs while struggling to raise her son, from nightclub dancer to fry cook to (briefly) prostitute. (Fun fact: she was the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.) In the 1950s, she toured the world as a dancer in a production of George Gerschwin’s Porgy and Bess and also got involved with the Harlem Writers Guild. In 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr., asked her to be the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the 60s, she briefly lived in both Cairo and Ghana, where she edited papers. Upon her return to the U.S., she began writing screenplays for television and movies and also continued acting, getting nominated for a Tony Award for her role in “Look Away,” a play about Mary Todd Lincoln and her seamstress, even though the play closed after one night. She also appeared in “Roots” as Kunta Kinte’s grandmother.

Angelou’s poetry was never as highly regarded by the critics as her prose; some felt that her poems were lacking in craftsmanship and were most effective when she read them publicly herself. Her best-known poem is probably “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she was invited to compose and recite for the 1993 inauguration of Bill Clinton, who had also grown up in Arkansas. It begins: “A Rock, A River, A Tree / Hosts to species long since departed, / Marked the mastodon, / The dinosaur, who left dried tokens / Of their sojourn here / On our planet floor, / Any broad alarm of their hastening doom / Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages…” (It’s quite long; read the whole thing here.)

Angelou is best known for her memoirs. As the New York Times pointed out in her obituary (Margalit Fox, “Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86,” May 28, 2014), she had never intended to write memoirs and originally rejected the idea when approached by Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House. Then Loomis said, “You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature. Almost impossible.” Angelou took up the gauntlet and began immediately.

Stay well on this blustery blowing Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.