The Help

Front Cover
Large Print Press, 2011 - Fiction - 719 pages

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.



Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.



Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.



Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

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About the author (2011)

Kathryn Stockett was born in 1969 in Mississippi. She graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She soon got a job in magazine marketing and publishing in New York City. She became famous in 2009 with her debut novel, The Help. Her book tells the story of African-American Maids working in white households in Jackson Mississippi during the 1960's. It sold over ten million copies and spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.

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