# The Stamps Arkansas *A Biography of Maya Angelou* — Legendary Biographies No. 231 - **Subject:** Marguerite Annie Johnson (Maya Angelou) - **Written by:** Eleanor Whitlock - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 238 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-156-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-625-8) - **Content notes:** childhood sexual assault Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/231-the-stamps-arkansas.html ## About this book She died at her Winston-Salem home on May 28, 2014, at eighty-six, having published seven volumes of autobiography and spent nearly five years of her childhood not speaking at all. Her name at the start was Marguerite Annie Johnson, born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second of two children of a Navy dietician and a real-estate-agent mother. The parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother Bailey were raised in Stamps, Arkansas, by their paternal grandmother. At eight, in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, Freeman. He was tried and convicted; four days after his release her uncles kicked him to death. The silence lasted nearly five years. Her son Guy was born when she was sixteen. The work took every form available to her: streetcar conductor in San Francisco, calypso singer at the Purple Onion, actress on the European tour of Porgy and Bess, journalist in Cairo and Ghana, SCLC coordinator, Pulitzer-nominated poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of the seven autobiographies, came in 1969, when she was forty-one. On January 20, 1993, she recited On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's inauguration. Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier than any of that and follows the arc at the pace the catalog rewards: the grandmother's general store in Stamps, the Freeman trial and the muteness, the early San Francisco years and the Porgy and Bess tour, the Cairo and Accra years, the close friendships with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — the April 4, 1968 assassination fell on her birthday, and the book treats it as the central wound — the long Reynolds professorship at Wake Forest University from 1982, the seven autobiographies and the long catalog of poetry, and the 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Marguerite Annie Johnson of Stamps and St. Louis left seven autobiographies that the African-American literary tradition has spent fifty years writing into its centre. ## Contents 1. The Store 2. The Manila Tag 3. Annie at the Door 4. St. Louis, 1936 5. Mrs. Flowers 6. California, 1942 7. The Streetcar 8. Gather Together 9. Tosh and the Purple Onion 10. Calypso Heat Wave 11. Cabaret for Freedom 12. Cairo 13. Accra 14. April 4, 1968 15. The Hotel Room 16. The Project 17. On the Pulse of Morning 18. Reynolda Road ## Questions **Who is The Stamps Arkansas about?** Marguerite Annie Johnson (Maya Angelou). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Stamps Arkansas — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 2,835 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 74,000 words, 18 chapters, 238 pages in the paperback. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: childhood sexual assault. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Eleanor Whitlock is a New York-based biographer who writes about American women of letters and their reckonings with celebrity. Her research focuses on the private spaces and public moments that shape literary history, as seen in her biographies of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, both of which were shortlisted for national biography prizes. Through titles like Black Holes, The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk, and The Biafra Broadcasts, she examines the intersection of archival history and personal narrative. Her other publications include The Jamaican Renaissance, The Fitzroy Road Kitchen, The Plaza Hotel Party, The Owl Farm, and The Elysee Hotel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends her spare time restoring vintage typewriters and walking in Prospect Park.