Maya Angelou wrote her first book because her editor said she couldn’t
The reverse psychology was James Baldwin’s idea and ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ became a bestseller
Maya Angelou was deeply sad. Her friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated a few months prior and depression had made a home in Maya. Her dear friend James Baldwin, or Jimmy and her “brother friend” as she affectionately called him, took her to a dinner party to brighten her spirits, if only for the night. The party was at the home of the Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968. Everyone in the room began sharing stories about their childhoods, but when it was Angelou’s turn to speak, Mrs. Feiffer was blown away by her storytelling.
The next day Feiffer called Random House editor Robert Loomis to tell him he should have Angelou write a book. Following Mrs. Feiffer’s orders, Loomis asked Angelou to write a book about her life, but she said no. Angelou considered herself a poet and playwright, not an author. He asked again; she declined again. Around the fourth time he changed his tune. She had just written a TV series and was out in California when he called.
“It’s just as well you don’t attempt to write autobiography, because to write autobiography as literature is almost impossible,” she remembers him saying.
“Maybe I’ll try it,” she replied.
Loomis’s new tactic had been inspired by a conversation with Baldwin. Baldwin told Loomis that in order to get Angelou to do anything, you have to tell her she can’t do it. The reverse psychology worked. She isolated herself in London and began writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first of her seven book autobiography series. It was instantly a bestseller and is her most critically acclaimed work.
Had it not been for Baldwin and Angelou’s pugnacious tenacity, the world may have never known she was a masterful memoirist.
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