Maya Angelou, the prolific African-American author, is best known for her serial autobiography and her several volumes of poetry, which have generated great interest and critical acclaim because they embody her tenacity in overcoming social obstacles and her struggle for self-acceptance. Maya Angelou's life experience proved to be a repudiation of Euro-American cultural assumptions and an affirmation of African-American cultural norms. She explores the discrepancy between the idealization of marriage, femininity, family, and motherhood in the larger American culture and her actual experience as a black woman. Her serial autobiography, no doubt, recaptures that confrontation, but portrays, at the same time, the extraordinary life of a black woman who has survived and triumphed. This paper probes the nature of challenges that Maya Angelou faced and the quality of her response which made her an extraordinary woman.

Maya Angelou, one of the greatest voices of contemporary African American literature, is best known for her serial autobiography and numerous volumes of poetry, which embody her tenacity in overcoming social obstacles and her struggle for self-acceptance. Certainly, the serial autobiography is Maya Angelou's personal narrative, celebrating her psychological, spiritual, and political odyssey. The first volume of her serial autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), portrays her life up to sixteen, providing a child's perspective of the perplexing world of adults in Stamps, Arkansas. The second volume, Gather Together in My Name (1974), gives a trenchant account of a young woman's struggle to have an existence that provides security and love. The third volume, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), describes an unwed mother's efforts at seeking a career in show business and her encounters with white people at an intimate personal level for the first time. The fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman (1980), vividly presents the complex race relations which Maya Angelou finds in European countries while travelling as a dancer and singer with "Porgy and Bess," as well as her relationship with her son, Guy Johnson, who is slowly moving away from her towards independent selfhood. And the fifth volume,All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), traces Maya Angelou's quest for home, with post-colonial Africa enabling her to realize that she is distinctly American and in many ways isolated from traditional African society, though she has cultural ties to the land of her ancestors.

While the five volumes of her autobiography, no doubt, recapture Maya Angelou's subjective experiences and her spiritual growth and awareness, they demonstrate, at the same time, that her personal experiences mirror the period of 1920-1965 in the history of African-American people—family is constituted as the essential moral center of society, of which woman is the silent, unpaid domestic guardian; woman's social identity is obliterated, and the home acquires an illusive power and appeal, security, and comfort; and assumed risk and terror in the process of breaking through the walls of home help maintain the harmony of this patriarchal unit. To the socialist feminists, the marriage contract is a work contract in which a woman produces mainly for the family's internal use.

American Literature Journal, Social Obstacles, Economic Politics, Political Economy, Eurocultural Norms, Racial Equality, Autobiographical Cradition, Cultural Identities, Racist Capitalism, Self-Empowering Identity.