William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Margot Lee Shetterly
Margot Lee Shetterly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008201289
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008201302
Version: 2018-09-26
To my parents, Margaret G. Lee and Robert B. Lee III, and to all of the women at the NACA and NASA who offered their shoulders to stand on
CONTENTS
12 Serendipity
13 Turbulence
16 What a Difference a Day Makes
17 Outer Space
21 Out of the Past, the Future
23 To Boldly Go
“Negro.” “Colored.” “Indian.” “Girls.” Though some readers might find the language of Hidden Figures discordant to their modern ears, I’ve made every attempt to remain true to the time period, and to the voices of the individuals represented in this story.
Mrs. Land worked as a computer out at Langley,” my father said, taking a right turn out of the parking lot of First Baptist Church in Hampton, Virginia.
My husband and I visited my parents just after Christmas in 2010, enjoying a few days away from our full-time life and work in Mexico. They squired us around town in their twenty-year-old green minivan, my father driving, my mother in the front passenger seat, Aran and I buckled in behind like siblings. My father, gregarious as always, offered a stream of commentary that shifted fluidly from updates on the friends and neighbors we’d bumped into around town to the weather forecast to elaborate discourses on the physics underlying his latest research as a sixty-six-year-old doctoral student at Hampton University. He enjoyed touring my Maine-born-and-raised husband through our neck