The Heart of a Woman was published by Random House in 1981. The fourth autobiography covers approximately 1957-1962: Angelou’s years of deepest political engagement, when her personal story becomes intertwined with the civil rights movement, African liberation struggles, and the broader Black freedom movement of the era.
Angelou joins the Harlem Writers Guild (working alongside John Oliver Killens, James Baldwin, and other Black writers); becomes coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Martin Luther King Jr.’s request; meets and befriends Malcolm X; falls in love with Vusumzi Make, a South African freedom fighter; marries him and moves to Cairo. The book ends with Angelou in Ghana, where she will spend the next several years.
The volume is rich in historical portraits: Angelou’s accounts of working with King and Malcolm X are valuable as eyewitness testimony, vivid in their rendering of these figures as human beings rather than icons. Her portrait of the Black artistic and political community in New York — its brilliance, its quarrels, its sexual politics, its heroism — is unmatched. And her account of her relationship with Make — the excitement, the cultural clashes, his infidelities, her growing independence — is honest about the difficulty of maintaining personal identity within a consuming political cause.
Collecting The Heart of a Woman
First edition (Random House, New York, 1981): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40
- Signed: $100–$200
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the fourth autobiography about? The Heart of a Woman (1981) covers Angelou’s involvement in the civil rights movement during the late 1950s and 1960s — her work with Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, her friendship with Malcolm X, her marriage to South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make, and her years living in Egypt and Ghana. Many readers consider it the strongest of the sequels to Caged Bird.