Mudbound Thesis Statement: In Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel Mudbound, The novel takes place in the late 1940’s in Mississippi, It talks about the life of two families one black and one white, and what issues that they deal with daily as farm owners and sharecroppers and the novels meaning is the struggle is real no matter who and what you are. Hillary Jordan the author of Mudbound, I was wondering why she wrote this novel and what was her inspiration of it and I found out from this NPR interview her inspiration was based on her grandmother's life. Here are some quotes from the interview “Jordan says Mudbound was inspired by her mother's family stories of the year they spent on an isolated farm without running water or electricity. Eventually, it grew into a larger story with …show more content…
She has received numerous awards for Mudbound and has another novel called When She Woke, She also earned her bachelor's degree from Wellesley college and a masters degree from Columbia University. In this article about the book we found out how she came up with the characters and how they connect to her as a person, “ In composing Mudbound, Jordan drew on some of these stories and even based several of the novel’s white characters on real people, such as her grandmother and grandfather. Jordan told Neufeld that like Laura, the central white character in Mudbound, “My grandmother married late. She married an older man [who] took her from the city to a rural farm. . . . Other family members were there. . . . [Still, the] characters are characters, they’re not real people. The closest character to a real person is Henry [who] is a lot like my grandfather was.” However, as Jordan further explained, “everybody else is an invention. All the black characters are complete inventions” (Neufeld). Commenting on the background of Mudbound, Jordan says,