The first volume of Angelou's autobiography is deservedly famous. Not just for the content, but for the prose. Her prose! It's so restrained and so lovely. I don't read a whole lot of autobiographies, but I think I'm going to have to look up more of them done by poets, because there's such an elegance to the language here. And as someone who reads not only, but substantially, for the beauty of words, this is a wonderful read.

The book covers Angelou's childhood, spent largely (but not entirely) in the American south of the 1930s and 1940s. As a young black girl in what was an enormously racist society, her perceptions of the world around her are simultaneous in their impressions, the text merging her childish groping for understanding with the absolute comprehension of the adult writer. The horror of some of what goes on around her is muted somewhat, primarily by the shielding presence of her grandmother, but it's still seeping beneath every page, and it's enormously affecting. I'm going to have to read the other six volumes...