Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, a novel about the pre-Civil Rights South, has dominated the bestseller lists for a year. The story’s protagonist, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, graduates from Ole Miss and returns home to Jackson, Mississippi. She dreams about writing a book of substance and comes up with a topic: how black maids really feel about working for Southern white women in the early 1960s when Jim Crow laws were still enforced. Interviewing the maids surreptitiously and inventing a fictitious name for her town, Skeeter’s book becomes a success while turning Southern society upside down.

Stockett’s own story is similar to Skeeter’s. She’s from Jackson, Mississippi and, like Skeeter, she has written a book that has proved to be both popular and controversial. Unlike Skeeter, however, Stockett spent 16 years working in New York before her book was published. “In terms of writing, it helped being in New York, especially when you are writing about things that pertain to your childhood,” she said. “You get out of the eye of the storm, get away from the subject you are trying to write about.”

Film director Tate Taylor (left), Stockett’s childhood friend, was the one who urged her to make the move to New York. “It was the easiest move I ever made,” she said. “Tate had been up there for three weeks and he called and said, `Get up here!’ So I tended to my business and came up.”

DreamWorks has bought the film right to The Help and Taylor, whose last film was Pretty Ugly People, will direct from his own adapted screenplay. “I could think of no better writer than Tate,” said Stockett. “We share the same view on Mississippi. It’s a defensive appreciation.”

Casting for the film has just begun and Stockett said she was recently in New York to observe the process. “They are going after everybody,” she said, noting that A-list, well-known actresses are being considered. “In some cases, it might be better to have an unknown for some of the parts,” so the actresses won’t be forced to “drop that Hollywood persona,” Stockett said.

Emma Stone, a 21 year-old actress, who has had roles in Superbad and Zombieland, is being considered for the part of Skeeter. Bloggers, however, heavily favor the more experienced Claire Danes.

Stockett took five years to write The Help and she is still overwhelmed with the book’s success. “I’m stunned,” she said. “I thought the only people who would read it were my family.”

By now the story of how The Help got published is well know. Literary agent Susan Ramer, acting on the advice of a freelance editor who had seen the book, agreed to read the manuscript. “I was hooked right away,” she said. “The voice was very strong.” Even though numerous other agents had turned the book down, Ramer felt the book could be a bestseller.

Stockett said she was in a truck stop with her friend, Tate, when her publisher called to give her the news that The Help had moved up to number 16 on bestseller lists. It has now been on the New York Times Hardcover list for 50 weeks. “The staying power has been incredible,” said Ramer.

The book has been nominated for the Orange Prize Longlist, a prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom. “Everyone was so excited,” Stockett said, noting that she received many emails.

Usually the comments she receives come from women who have been moved by the book. “Some write me a letter and say, you captured my childhood. This is exactly what we went through,” she said. “Or they will write from North Dakota and say they had no idea this was going on.”

Many readers admit to knowing one of the book’s least likeable characters, Hilly, who spearheads a community plan to install separate black bathroom facilities in white employer’s homes. “They never cast themselves in that role,” said Stockett. “The phrase I hear a lot is, `We were never like that. We treated our help like family.’ Family that had to use the bathroom in the garage.”

Asked to name a favorite character in the book, Stockett said that in the end she “loved them all and hated them all. You get so close to these people, they are like your family.” In retrospect, she wished she had spent more time developing one of the book’s white women, Celia Foote, who comes from the wrong side of the tracks and never manages to break into Jackson’s upper class society. “She was quite fragile and she tried to commit suicide, unbeknownst to everyone in the book.”

Critics have compared The Help to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. “I’m flattered, but I don’t buy it,” said Stockett. “I would never compare myself to a classic. And certainly not to a classic of a classic.”

One has to admit, however, that Stockett’s timing was superb. Her book about racial tension in the South is published when there is now an African American in the White House. “Someone asked me if I planned it,” she said. “Writers have almost no control over whether they are going to be published.”

When she isn’t traveling to promote her book, Stockett makes her home in Atlanta. Anything she misses about living in New York? “Don’t get me started!” she said with a laugh.” I had to move to New York to write a book about Mississippi.” Although Stockett keeps an apartment in New York and visits once a month, she misses “the day to day living. Not having to deal with a car was wonderful.”