The Help

The Help is a historical novel by the American author Kathryn Stockett, published by Penguin Books in 2009. It is about African Americans working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s.

The book is narrated by three women. Skeeter has just come home from university and finds that the maid who raised her, Constantine, has disappeared without explanation. Aibileen is a maid bringing up another woman's child while grieving her own son, who died while his employers looked away. Minny is her friend, an excellent cook who cannot hold her tongue and consequently struggles to keep a position. Skeeter's mother is less interested in her degree than in her getting married, and the maid who raised her has vanished without anyone telling her where the woman went.

The novel's plot is the decision the three of them make to work together, which is presented as an extraordinary step for the time and place. The book was a first novel, written over five years after the September 11 attacks and rejected by sixty literary agents, and it was described early on as a summer sleeper hit before becoming a long-running bestseller.