Tillie Olsen
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Tillie Lerner Olsen (b. January 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska) is an American writer, associated with the political turmoil of 1930s and the first generation of American feminists. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, she dropped out of high school to enter the work force, and over the years worked as a waitress, domestic worker, and meat trimmer. She was also a union organizer and political activist, and in the 1930s she was briefly a member of the American communist party. She was briefly jailed in 1934 while organizing a packinghouse workers' union, an experience she wrote about in The Nation and The Partisan Review.
She attempted to introduce the challenges of her own life and the political circumstances of the time into a novel which she worked on during the 1930s, begun when she was only 19. Only an excerpt of the first chapter was published, in The Partisan Review in 1934, and it led to a contract with Random House. However, she adandoned the book, owing to work, childrearing, and household responsibilities. Decades later, the novel was eventually published, unfinished, as Yonnondio: From the Thirties in 1974. Her first published book, however, was a collection of four short stories, Tell Me a Riddle, published in 1961. Three of the stories are from the point of view of mothers: "I Stand Here Ironing" is the first and shortest story in the collection, about a woman who is estranged from her daughter. "O Yes" is the story of a white woman whose young daughter's friendship with a black girl is becoming fragile, to her mother's concern. The title story, the longest in the collection, is the story of the decline of an elderly immigrant woman, the matriarch of an assimilated American family she has difficulty understanding. It was awarded the O. Henry Prize in 1961 for best American short story of the year. The fourth story, "Hey Sailor, What Ship?", is from the point of view of an aging sailor whose friendship with a San Francisco family (relatives of the main character in "Tell Me a Riddle") is becoming increasingly strained. Tell Me a Riddle, Olsen's only completed book of fiction, has become a staple of college and university literature curricula in the United States.
Her non-fiction volume, entitled Silences, is an analysis of authors' silent periods in literature, including writer's blocks, unpublished work, and the problems that working-class writers and women in particular have in finding the time to concentrate on their art. One of her findings was that all of the great women writers in Western literature prior to the late 20th century either had no children or had full-time housekeepers to raise the children. The second part of the book is a study of the work of little-known writer Rebecca Harding Davis. The book was famously researched and written in the San Francisco Public Library.
Though she has published very little, she has been enormously influential for her treatment of the lives and thoughts of women and the poor and for drawing attention to why women have been less likely to be published authors (and why they receive less attention when they do). The extent of her centrality to American feminist fiction has caused some critics to be frustrated at simplistic feminist interpretations of her work.[1] In particular, several critics have pointed to a greater role than is traditionally seen for Olsen's communist past.[2]
[edit] Notes
[edit] Major works
- Tell Me A Riddle, Lippincott, 1961. Reprinted, Rutgers University Press, 1995
- Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Delacorte, 1974. Reprinted, Dell, 1989.
- Silences, Delacorte, 1978. Reprinted, Dell, 1989
- Mothers & Daughters: That Special Quality: An Exploration in Photographs with Estelle Jussim, Aperture, 1995.
[edit] References
- Dawahare, Anthony. "'That Joyous Certainty': History and Utopia in Tillie Olsen's Depression-Era Literature." Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 3. (Autumn, 1998), pp. 261-275.
- Rosenfelt, Deborah. "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition." Feminist Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3. (Autumn, 1981), pp. 371-406.
- Schultz, Lydia A. "Flowing against the Traditional Stream: Consciousness in Tillie Olsen's 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" MELUS, Vol. 22, No. 3, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 113-131.
