My Literary Hero: Kathryn Stockett

By Morgan Scherrer

My Literary Hero

                Describing the ruff and scary life as an African American maid in Jackson, Mississippi around the 1960s era when the country was still extremely racial could be hard and somewhat of a touchy subject, but  Kathryn Stockett is able to make it seem easy to write about.  Kathryn was born in Jackson Mississippi as well.  The book is not an autobiography about her life but she does add her personality and opinions carefully into the novel.  The Character Skeeter attends college and graduates from the University of Mississippi with a degree, like wise Kathryn graduates from Alabama University with a degree in English and Creative Writing.  In this time not many women graduate college let alone go to college.  Skeeter is different she wants to follow her dreams and become a journalist or an author, she does not want to do what white women her age were supposed to do and that was stay home and pretend to take care of the kids and do all the house chores while the husband was at work making money, while in reality you have a maid come over and doing everything for you, while you sit and chat with all your friends who are doing the exact same thing. 

The maids were treated terribly and they received little to what they deserved.  Skeeter enjoyed to be around the maids and wanted to write an article that interviewed the maids and their opinions about their life.  In the end of the book Skeeter ends up writing a book about all that she learned from her interviews.  Kathryn stated “in 1970s Mississippi I didn’t have a single black friend or black neighbor.  Yet one of the closest people to me was Demetrie, out family’s black housekeeper.”  She loved Demetrie and she knew that the way that the maids were treated was wrong.  Kathryn is able to bring across the attention to the United States about how brutal the lives of these maids were. 

The tone is set in the novel as they would have spoken in the 1960s in Jackson, with not so proper English and a lot of “yalls” and southern accents.  Kathryn inspires me because she wrote about something that is not easy to write about.  She is able to bring back a horrible and sad time for African Americans in a classy and educational way.  The book is by no means a historical novel, there are some references but for the most part the books is fun loving and tells a lot about what life was really like.