Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is a nonfiction novel about the “human computers” who performed the calculations that launched humanity into space.
Hidden Figures follows the interwoven lives of four black women—Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden—in third-person point of view, with their stories tied into broader historical context. Though the novel centers around their work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, it also covers American events over three decades, starting with World War II and ending with the lunar landing. The women are some of the many black women hired into the “West Computing” group at the NACA, which becomes NASA. They are exceptional mathematicians, and even at the height of Virginia’s Jim Crow segregation, their calculations ensure pilots’ safety in WWII and eventually land the Apollo 11 mission on the Moon.
Published in 2016, Hidden Figures was a #1 New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a critically and financially successful movie. Shetterly says in interviews that stories “tend to put these histories in silos,” even though “all of those things are American history”—women’s history, black history, space history, and civil rights history are all part of the same story—one section of which is told in Hidden Figures.
