#biography First published in 1958 and selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year, Willie Mae is a first-person account of a black woman's life and her ex- periences as a domestic worker in a succession of southern households in the first half of the century. Powerful and poignant, some- times funny and always honest, Willie Mae is a testament to the courage and strength of a gener- ation of women who struggled to survive with dignity and humanity in the years before the civil rights movement.