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Maya Angelou's Reading List

Notable reader profiled on radicalreads.com. 14 favorite books recommended in their radicalreads feature.

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Favorite books (2023)

Favorite books recommended by Maya Angelou, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/maya-angelou-favorite-books/.

Source: radicalreads.com

Jane Goodall , Martin Luther King Jr. , Maya Ange lou & Neil deGrasse Tyson ) · Buy on Amazon
"I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth."
Louisa May Alcott (also rec’d by Elizabeth Warren , Glennon Doyle , Gloria Steinem , Hillary Clinton , John Lennon, Maya Angelou & Shonda Rhimes ) · Buy on Amazon
"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."
Countee Cullen · Buy on Amazon
Cover of A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens · Buy on Amazon
"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."
Paul Laurence Dunbar · Buy on Amazon
"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."
Ralph Ellison (also rec’d by Alice Walker ) · Buy on Amazon
"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."
Langston Hughes (also rec’d by Martin Luther King Jr. ) · Buy on Amazon
James Weldon Johnson · Buy on Amazon
Edna St. Vincent Millay · Buy on Amazon
Janice Mirikitani · Buy on Amazon
Octavio Paz · Buy on Amazon
Walt Whitman (also rec’d by Bob Dylan & Bruce Springsteen ) · Buy on Amazon
Cover of Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe · Buy on Amazon
"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."

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