<P> Critic Robert A. Gross called Caged Bird "a tour de force of language". Edmund Fuller insisted that Angelou's intellectual range and artistry were apparent in how she told her story . Caged Bird catapulted Angelou to international fame and critical acclaim, was a significant development in Black women's literature in that it "heralded the success of other now prominent writers". Other reviewers have praised Angelou's use of language in the book, including critic E.M. Guiney, who reported that Caged Bird was "one of the best autobiographies of its kind that I have read". Critic R.A. Gross praised Angelou for her use of rich and dazzling images . </P> <P> By the mid-1980s, Caged Bird had gone through 20 hardback printings and 32 paperback printings . The week after Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, sales of the paperback version of Caged Bird and her other works rose by 300--600 percent . Caged Bird had sold steadily since its publication, but it increased by 500 percent . The 16 - page publication of "On the Pulse of Morning" became a best - seller, and the recording of the poem was awarded a Grammy Award . The Bantam Books edition of Caged Bird was a bestseller for 36 weeks, and they had to reprint 400,000 copies of her books to meet demand . Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, marking a 1,200 percent increase . </P> <P> The book's reception has not been universally positive; for example, author Francine Prose considers its inclusion in the high school curriculum as partly responsible for the "dumbing down" of American society . Prose calls the book "manipulative melodrama", and considers Angelou's writing style an inferior example of poetic prose in memoir . She accuses Angelou of combining a dozen metaphors in one paragraph and for "obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously". Many parents throughout the U.S. have sought to ban the book from schools and libraries for being inappropriate for younger high school students, for promoting premarital sex, homosexuality, cohabitation, and pornography, and for not supporting traditional values . Parents have also objected to the book's use of profanity and to its graphic and violent depiction of rape and racism . </P> <P> When Caged Bird was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African - American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life . Up to that point, Black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters . Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", has insisted that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for African - American autobiography as a whole . Als insisted that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a Black autobiographer could, as Als put it, "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense". Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized as a respected spokesperson for blacks and women . Caged Bird made her "without a doubt...America's most visible black woman autobiographer". Although Als considers Caged Bird an important contribution to the increase of Black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than to "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist" of its time, at the end of the American Civil Rights movement . Angelou's writings, more interested in self - revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other women writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world". </P>

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