They each faced different things along the way. Shetterly: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden - each of them represented a certain slice of the narrative in terms of the development of women in the workplace over that time. I wanted it to be a story that could show that broad group, but at the same time, in order to make it interesting, to make it a story as opposed to a history textbook, you have to choose the people with the most compelling stories. During a time of Jim Crow segregation, during a time when women frequently weren't even allowed to have credit cards in their own names, here were these women - large numbers of women - doing very high-level mathematical work at one of the highest scientific institutions in the world at that time. This is the story of broad success of women overall, and African-American women specifically, in a job category that it's simply assumed where they don't exist.

Shetterly: You couldn't tell this as a single person's story. : How did you choose which women to focus on for your narrative? (Image credit: NASA/Langley Research Center) It is now on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. This NACA sign, the emblem for NASA's predecessor the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, hung over the doorway to the 8-Foot Transonic Pressure Tunnel at the agency's Langley Research Center in Virginia since 1953. The book focuses on Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who famously double-checked the calculations for Glenn's launch trajectory (and for whom a Langley research facility was recently named), and three other women whose lives and work tie together the history of spaceflight, civil rights and the evolution of the American dream - all in one little Virginia city. As the years passed and the center evolved, the West Wing Computers - the East Wing consisted of white women - became engineers, (electronic) computer programmers, the first black managers at Langley and trajectory whizzes whose work propelled the first American, John Glenn, into orbit in 1962. In those days, it was known as Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, and it was run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Shetterly's new book, 'Hidden Figures' (William Morrow, 2016) follows the black women at Langley who were first hired during World War II as 'computers,' scratching out complex computations for the center's aeronautical and rocket research before the days of electronic computing. Margot Shetterly, author of 'Hidden Figures' (Image credit: William Morrow)

Shetterly margot lee