
Angelou's collection of short stories and poems, some light and some more serious, weaves a delicate tale of her life.Īll the pieces are different, each with a lesson to offer.

Here is my offering to you.Do you remember the last book that made you think? Think about how lucky you are, how you could be a better person, why people are the way they are? Letter To My Daughter, by Maya Angelou, does all of this, and more. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. “I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.

Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.


