Gather Together in My Name continues Maya Angelou’s autobiographical cycle after the extraordinary success of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The book follows Angelou in the turbulent years after becoming a teenage mother in the mid-1940s. Moving through wartime California and the uneasy freedoms of postwar America, she drifts through a series of jobs and worlds — cook, dancer, streetcar conductor, club performer — while raising her young son.

Angelou writes about poverty, racism, love, crime, and misjudgment with an almost alarming honesty, tracing how a young woman tests the boundaries of adulthood before gradually assembling a sense of self.

Angelou presents early adulthood as a sequence of improvisations through which identity slowly hardens into something durable. A beautiful book.