Quartet of Stories

Maya Angelou

Longman, 1996 - Fiction - 162 pages

Offers challenging and original perspectives on relationships, societies and cultures. These are stories of people, especially black women, making their voices heard as they endure, survive, create and laugh together.

Stories include: Incident in the Yard, Names and Visit to the Dentist by Maya Angelou; Nineteen Fifty-Five, The Flowers and to Hell with Dying by Alice Walker; Love Orange, Do Angels Wear Brassieres? And the Boy Who Loved Ice Cream by Olive Senior; The Dolly Funeral, I Come Through, I Don't Want to Go Home in the Dark, The King of Swords and Bella Makes a Life by Lorna Goodison.

Contents

• Incident in the Yard: 4
• Names: 10
• Visit to the Dentist: 17

About the author

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in Saint Louis, Missouri. At the age of 16, she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. In the mid-1950s, she toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. In 1957, she recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she became a part of the Harlem Writers Guild in New York and played a queen in The Blacks, an off-Broadway production by French dramatist Jean Genet. In 1960, she moved to Cairo, where she edited The Arab Observer, an English-language weekly newspaper. The following year, she went to Ghana where she was features editor of The African Review and taught music and drama at the University of Ghana. In 1964, she moved back to the U.S. to become a civil rights activist by helping Malcolm X build his new coalition, the Organization of African American Unity, and became the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Even though she never went to college, she taught American studies for years at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. In 1993, she became only the second poet in United States history to write and recite an original poem at a Presidential Inauguration when she read On the Pulse of Morning at President Bill Clinton's Inauguration Ceremony. She wrote numerous books during her lifetime including: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, and Mom and Me and Mom. In 2011, President Barack Obama gave her the Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, for her collected works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She appeared in the movie Roots and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1977 for her role in the movie. She also played a part in the movie, How to Make an American Quilt and wrote and produced Afro-Americans in the Arts, a PBS special for which she received a Golden Eagle Award. She was a three-time Grammy winner. She died on May 28, 2014 at the age of 86.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Quartet of Stories; Longman literature
• Author: Maya Angelou
• Editor: Liz Gerschel
• Edition: 7, reprint
• Publisher: Longman, 1996
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Feb 29, 2008
• ISBN: 0582287308, 9780582287303
• Length: 162 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Short Stories (single author); Juvenile Nonfiction / Literary Criticism & Collections