Charismatic and passionate warm and wise, formidable without being forbidding, American author and poet Maya Angelou, who has died aged 86, was a role model and an activist who recorded and celebrated the experience of being black in the United States.
Not everyone appreciated her lush prose style, there were raised eyebrows at the inconsistencies in her different accounts of her life, and some conservative Americans protested at what they saw as her books’ frank treatment of violence and sexuality.
But few could quarrel with the breadth of her erudition and her achievement – she was often called a Renaissance woman – or the respect in which she was held.
Read it all.
(BBC) Obituary: Maya Angelou
Charismatic and passionate warm and wise, formidable without being forbidding, American author and poet Maya Angelou, who has died aged 86, was a role model and an activist who recorded and celebrated the experience of being black in the United States.
Not everyone appreciated her lush prose style, there were raised eyebrows at the inconsistencies in her different accounts of her life, and some conservative Americans protested at what they saw as her books’ frank treatment of violence and sexuality.
But few could quarrel with the breadth of her erudition and her achievement – she was often called a Renaissance woman – or the respect in which she was held.
Read it all.