Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 19, 2023

Gather Together in My Name is the second of seven memoirs by Maya Angelou (pictured). Published in 1974, the book begins just after the events of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and follows Angelou from the ages of 17 to 19. Written three years after Caged Bird, the book "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime." She expands upon many themes that she started discussing in her first autobiography, including motherhood and family, racism, identity, education and literacy. Gather Together received mostly positive reviews; it was not as critically acclaimed as Caged Bird, but was recognized as being better written. The book's structure, consisting of a series of episodes tied together by theme and content, parallels the chaos of adolescence, which some critics felt makes it an unsatisfactory sequel. The title, taken from the Bible, conveys how one black woman lived in white-dominated American society after World War II.