All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, published in 1986, is the fifth book in African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou's seven-volume autobiography series. Set between 1962 and 1965 and taking its title from a Negro spiritual, the book begins when Angelou is thirty-three years old, and recounts her time in Accra, Ghana. It starts where her previous book, The Heart of a Woman, ends, with the traumatic car accident involving her son Guy, and ends as she returns to America. Angelou (pictured in 2013) upholds the long tradition of African-American autobiography, and at the same time makes a deliberate attempt to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. As in her previous books, it consists of a series of anecdotes connected by theme. She depicts her struggle with being the mother of a grown son, and with her place in her new home. Angelou examines many of the same subjects and themes of her previous autobiographies, including motherhood, the parallels and connections between the African and American parts of her history and character, and racism. (Full article...)
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