Tillie Olsen: life, work, and literary significance

¶ … quantifiable terms, Tillie Olsen's literary output has been admittedly modest. However, her influence has been anything but. As a writer, a feminist and an activist, she has worked throughout her life to serve her core values. Born to a pair of Jewish Russian immigrants, Ida and Samuel Lerner, Olsen's circumstances would play a significant role in both the formation of her belief system and the ways in which she would pursue its actualization. Well regarded in the notes of history, particularly those forged by advocates of the advancement of the women's movement, she holds a legacy of fellowships, awards and documents to justify the acclaim. Perhaps the most important and unique characteristic of Olsen's life is the apparently seamless fashion in which she tied the varied strands of her life into a singular identity. Her devotion to her literary work, to her family and to her politics were inextricable from one another and from the larger entity of Tillie herself.

The destruction of her birth certificate leaves Tillie Lerner's exact date of birth a mystery, though she has estimated it to be either 1912 or 1913. Whichever, it happened somewhere in the vicinity of Omaha, Nebraska, where her parents had settled into a Jewish socialist community. This fact, compounded by the hardships of farm living and the working class makeup of her family and neighbors, would have a tremendous impact on Tillie's understanding of the world. As a child, she came to view capitalism as an evil designed to advance the elite and detain the oppressed in their indigence. Her father's position as State Secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party, which included a run for district representative in the twenties, would bring her into contact with a wide variety of socialist figures of the time that would help to shape her ideals from a young age.

Due to her exposure to many politicos and intellectuals, as well as a natural endowment of intellectual capabilities, Tillie was able to transcend the limitations of her socio-economic status, if only for a brief time, to attend an academic high school where she was presented with greater opportunity and a richer education. And though financial needs would force her to drop out a year before she could graduate, she would be fast to point out in later interviews that she was blessed with far more education than most women in her peer group, particularly those born of working class families. But more often than not, her writing was guided heavily by political influences, as opposed to academic ones. As such, much of her early work arrived in the form of skits, propaganda as it were, for the socialist groups with which she associated. By the age of 18, she had become a member of the Young Communists League, and thus entered a phase of intense activism that would even result in imprisonment for the distribution of union-advocating leaflets at a tie-factory in which she claimed employment. While in prison, she developed an illness that would soon evolve into tuberculosis. Ironically, Olsen reminisces about the illness with fondness, as its effects forced her to stay in bed under the care of her community. It provided her with a great deal of writing time, with which she began to produce her first novel, Yonnondi. It was in 1934, when her short piece, The Iron Throat, appeared in The Partisan Review, that she began to receive some attention. In a matter of time, Olsen, who had recently given birth to her first, and unplanned, daughter, had signed a contract with Random House that would award her a stipend every month in exchange for the completion of one chapter of the aforementioned novel. However, the stresses of being away from her class group, as she was deeply immersed in a scene of Hollywood leftists rather than labor revolutionaries, and the distance between she and her newborn daughter who stayed with family, took their toll. She was unable to complete her novel and returned home to be with family, where she would marry Jack Olsen, a fellow communist and 1934 arrestee.

With the birth of another three daughters, Tillie's identity would take on new facets. Much of her life became devoted to the rearing of her children, as she maintained a series of low-wage jobs and the continuance of her labor activism. She would write whenever a moment would avail itself. But there was always a degree of paradox to the life she hoped to lead. While her aspirations to be a great writer were not enough to grant her comfort in the Hollywood crowd, she still felt a separation from her comrade workers who hadn't the desire or the means to achieve in such an elitist field. She came to terms with some of the contradictions in her life by assessing her experiences, such as motherhood and relative poverty, as necessary to her development as a writer.

Bearing that in mind, Olsen would finally come back to writing in a serious capacity in 1953, when she enrolled in a San Francisco State writing class. While she was in no need of any great deal of instruction, given her life experiences and natural gifts, the class led her to receive a fellowship from Stanford University, during which she crafted and assembled what is perhaps her best known work, the collection Tell Me A Riddle. The compilation of short stories contained "I Stand Here Ironing," whose title speaks for itself. Concerning the daily struggles of the female intellectual grappling with socially dictated housekeeping responsibilities, the piece helped to solidify Olsen's reputation as one of the earliest activists in the feminist movement. A poignant account of the suffocation bred by household chores and the futility that many women felt in the face of domestic demands, the piece was the determining factor in her acquisition of the fellowship that would lead to its publication. The collection finally brought to greater attention a writer who had toiled with political essays and pamphlets for decades and its success rewarded Olsen with many grants and fellowships. And finally, in the early 70's, Jack Olsen discovered the fragmented remnants of Yonnondi and urged for its publication. So Tillie pieced together her old manuscript and the work was published in 1974.