6 Things You Didn't Know About Maya Angelou

As a young single mother, Angelou paid the bills at one time working as a stripper at a club.  A customer who later became a friend told her about an opening at the happening San Francisco nightclub The Purple Onion. She put together an act where she sang calypso songs and told stories. She later starred in the film "Calypso Heatwave" and released an album as "Miss Calypso," both in 1957. (Calypso music was having a moment in the U.S. in the late '50s.)

Angelou's best-known book was her first one, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," which tells the story of her early life. But she never set out to be a writer. By the late '60s, she was producing a TV series for PBS. She went out to dinner with writer James Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy. "All three of them are great talkers. They went on with their stories and I had to fight for the right to play it good. I had to insert myself to tell some stories too," she recalled in a Paris Review interview.

The stories were good enough that the next day Judy Feiffer told Bob Loomis, an editor at Random House, that he should try to get Angelou to write an autobiography. She turned him down three times. In the same interview she added, "Then he talked to James Baldwin. Jimmy gave him a ploy which always works with me—though I'm not proud to say that. The next time he called, he said, 'Well, Miss Angelou. I won't bother you again. It's just as well that you don't attempt to write this book, because to write autobiography as literature is almost impossible.' I said, 'What are you talking about? I'll do it.'"

Angelou was the first black female cable car conductor in San Francisco at age 16. She was also the first African-American woman to write a nonfiction bestseller (1969's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"), get a screenplay produced (1972's "Georgia Georgia") and direct a major movie (1998's "Down in the Delta").

Angelou's third marriage was to Paul du Feu, a Welsh master carpenter, comic strip writer and former husband of feminist Germaine Greer. (He'd also posed with Greer for British Cosmopolitan's first nude centerfold.) "He said that if I were British or he black he'd be agreeable to merely live together. But with the difference in cultures, he wanted to make a public statement. So we married.... We liked the ceremony so much, and love each other so much, that we've been married twice since, and we'll do it again," she told People magazine in 1975. Sadly, their marriage ended in 1981. Angelou has said she's not the easiest person to live with.

Angelou's birthday was on April 4, the same day as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Angelou had been the northern coordinator of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. For years after King's death, she did not celebrate her birthday. However, she always called Coretta, his widow, and sent her flowers on that day.

Angelou's 2015 stamp featured the line "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song" by poet Joan Walsh Anglund. Angelou quoted it in some interviews, but didn't take credit for it. (The U.S. Postal Service said it was unaware of the error until a newspaper pointed it out after the fact.) This is not the only writing misattributed to Angelou. At least two popular poems making the rounds on the internet have been wrongly attributed to her.