Best books...chosen by Maya Angelou

last updated 8 January 2015

In her new book, Mom & Me & Mom, Maya Angelou recalls her turbulent relationship with her late mother and their ultimate reconciliation. Below, the acclaimed poet and memoirist names six works that influenced her in her life and career.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Dover, $3.50). Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

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Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (Scribner, $18). I’ve read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel. It’s hard to select just one of Wolfe’s books, but his story of a man who leaves his North Carolina town to seek a better life was probably the most important to me.

The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Univ. of Virginia, $22.50). When you are put down by the larger society and there’s a poet who compares the color of your skin to chocolate and brown sugar, you fall for it, because you need it. Paul Laurence Dunbar—who was one of the great poets of the 19th and 20th centuries—wrote about African-Americans, and he showed me the beauty of our colors and the wonder of our music.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Bantam, $4). When I read Alcott, I knew that these girls she was talking about were all white. But they were nice girls and I understood them. I felt like I was almost there with them in their living room and their kitchen.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Vintage, $16). When I first read Ellison’s 1952 novel, it was as if somebody turned a bright light on in a dark corridor. That which I thought was so frightening, so terrifying, was just a shadow.