Maya Angelou tours with the opera Porgy and Bess

By the time she was in her early twenties, Angelou had worked at a variety of odd jobs, as a waitress, a cook, and a streetcar conductor, flirting briefly with prostitution and drug addiction. She then worked as a stage performer, establishing a reputation among the avant-garde of the early 1950s, and appearing in Porgy and Bess on a twenty-two-nation tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department in 1954–1955.

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