Banned Books

This 1970 memoir — the first of Maya Angelou's five autobiographical works — angered censors for its graphic depiction of racism and sex, especially the passages in which she recounts being raped by her mother's boyfriend as an 8-year-old child. (In the book, which was later nominated for a National Book Award, Angelou alludes to the Bible, writing, "The act of rape on an 8-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator can't.") The American Library Association ranked it the fifth most challenged book of the 21st century. The book's title refers to the 1899 poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the nation's first prominent African-American poets. In 1993, Angelou read an original poem at Bill Clinton's Inauguration, becoming only the second poet in U.S. history to do so after Robert Frost's 1960 speech for JFK.