Recommendations
Books Like The Help
Best books to read after The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Help brought the civil rights era to millions of readers through the voices of the women who lived it. These books extend the conversation — into stronger, more politically centered accounts of the same period; into the wider literature of race in the American South; and into the contemporary fiction about race that followed.
- 1Buy
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of racial injustice in Alabama in the 1930s — the literary predecessor to The Help in the tradition of the white Southern narrator bearing witness to Black suffering and the limits of white liberal intervention.
- 2Buy
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel about a Black woman's survival and self-discovery in the Deep South — the essential corrective to The Help's perspective: the same historical period, the same geography, from the inside.
- 3Buy
Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Butler's time-travel novel in which a contemporary Black woman is pulled back to antebellum Maryland — the most visceral fiction about the physical and psychological experience of racial oppression, without the soft-focus of The Help's perspective.
- 4Buy
Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly
The true story of the Black women mathematicians who were essential to NASA's space program — a non-fiction account of Black professional women in the same mid-century South, achieving extraordinary things in the same climate of segregation.
- 5Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning novel about the legacy of slavery — the most powerful fiction in the American literary tradition about the cost of racial oppression to Black women, and the necessary complement to any reading of The Help.
- 6Buy
The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd
Kidd's novel of a white girl who runs away from home in 1964 South Carolina and is sheltered by three Black beekeeping sisters — the contemporary parallel to The Help in its combination of civil rights era setting, race, and female solidarity.
- 7Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's 1937 novel about a Black woman's three marriages and journey to selfhood — the founding text of the African-American women's literary tradition and the historical predecessor to all subsequent fiction about Black women's interiority.
- 8Buy
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's devastating first novel about a Black girl in Ohio who wishes for blue eyes so she can be beautiful — the portrait of internalized racism that The Help touches but cannot fully articulate from its perspective.
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