Tillie Olsen - Introduction and Biography

Tillie Lerner Olsen was born in either 1912 or 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska.  Her exact birthdate and year remain unknown because her birth certificate was lost.  Her parents were diplomatic immigrants from Russia.  After the 1905 revolution they fled from Czarist domination.  They were forced to settle for low-wage jobs and a modest life in America.  Tillie was a bright child and she attended Omaha Central High School which is a school that is well-known for academic consistency.  She left school without completing her studies, in order to work various low-wage jobs.  The reason for this decision was partially because of her family’s need and her failure in a class.  She continued to read passionately in public libraries wherever she moved.  During the Great Depression she worked as a tie presser, a meat trimmer, a domestic worker and a waitress.  She began her novel, Yonnondio, at the age of nineteen.  She claimed that the novel focused on the lives of the public and the struggles of labor as a subject for literature.  She married Jack Olsen in 1936.   They had three daughters together as a couple.  She dedicated the majority of the next twenty years of her life to raising her four daughters.  She worked low-wage jobs and participated in political activities.  Olsen was involved in left-wing politics since the age of seventeen.  She was an active member of the Young Communists’ League.  She was detained for her efforts to unionize packinghouse workers.  Her husband, Jack, was also active politically and the couple spent a great deal of time supporting local left-wing politics and participated in unionization movements.  It was not until 1953 that Olsen returned to writing.  Her oldest daughter suggested that Tillie enroll in a writing class at San Francisco State.  She won a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University for 1955 and 1956.  Her novel, Yonnondio, was written on continuous sheets of paper as well as scrawled pages, envelopes, and discarded trash.  She pieced the novel together and selected the most appropriate fragments and published it in 1974.  Olsen had a remote collection of literary output.  Her influence on other writers, especially women, cannot be over-emphasized.  She was one of the first American writers to make manual labor and the difficulties of everyday people a subject for high tragedy.  She was also one of the First American writers to understand the particular ways in which women’s voices are persecuted by conditions of time, space, and resources.  On January 1, 2007 Olsen died in Oakland, California. 

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