Tillie Olsen

Price (paper): $26.95  
Price (cloth): $34.95  
Subtitle: One Woman, Many Riddles
Authors: Panthea Reid
Subject: Literary Studies, Women's Studies
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5187-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4637-7
Pages: 484 pages
Publication Date: September 2011 (First Paperback Edition)

Praise for Tillie Olsen:

"Reid brings her extraordinarily complex and endlessly perplexing subject to vitally disarming life and her book provides substantively more for Olsenites than any previous attempt. Tillie Olsen is rich--and riddled with answers."
—Philadelphia Inquirer, 11/21/10

"Attempting to solve 'the riddle' of Tillie Lerner Olsen, literary scholar Reid paints a warts-and-all portrait of the woman who became an iconic feminist and admired writer. Reid paints a deftly engrossing, nuanced, and meticulously researched portrait of a perplexing, larger-than-life woman."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

". . . an in-depth look at [Olsen's] life. Reid definitely knocks Olsen off any saintly
pedestal . . . but she does this without lessening the impact of Olsen's work."
—Feminist Review

"A remarkable amount of material on the life of Olsen. Students of Olsen's work will find this a valuable guide to the autobiographical roots of Olsen's fiction."
—Jewish Book World

"Reid brings her extraordinarily complex and endlessly perplexing subject to vitally disarming life and her book provides substantively more for Olsenites than any previous attempt. Tillie Olsen is rich—and riddled with answers."
—Philadelphia Inquirer

"The first comprehensive account of the extraordinary life of one of the twentieth century's most exalted writers. Compelling reading."
—Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

Description:

In Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles, Panthea Reid examines the complex life of this iconic feminist hero and twentieth-century literary giant.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Tillie Olsen spent her young adulthood there, in Kansas City, and in Faribault, Minnesota. She relocated to California in 1933 and lived most of her life in San Francisco. From 1962 on, she sojourned frequently in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Santa Cruz, and Soquel, California. She was a 1920s "hell-cat"; a 1930s revolutionary; an early 1940s crusader for equal pay for equal work and a war-relief patriot; an ex-GI's ideal wife in the later 1940s; a victim of FBI surveillance in the 1950s; a civil rights and antiwar advocate during the 1960s and 1970s; and a life-long orator for universal human rights.

The enigma of Tillie Olsen is intertwined with that of the twentieth century. From the rebellions in Czarist Russia, through the terrors of the Depression and the hopes of the New Deal, to World War II, the Nuremberg Trials, and the United Nations' founding, to the cold war and House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, to later progressive and repressive movements, the story of Olsen's life brings remote events into focus.

In her classic short story "I Stand Here Ironing" and her groundbreaking Tell Me a Riddle, Yonnondido, and Silences, Olsen scripted powerful, moving prose about ordinary people's lives, exposing the pervasive effects of sexism, racism, and classism and elevating motherhood and women's creativity into topics of study. Popularly referred to as "Saint Tillie," Olsen was hailed by many as the mother of modern feminism.

Based on diaries, letters, manuscripts, private documents, resurrected public records, and countless interviews, Reid's artfully crafted biography untangles some of the puzzling knots of the last century's triumphs and failures and speaks truth to legend, correcting fabrications and myths about and also by Tillie Olsen.

PANTHEA REID, a professor emerita of English from Louisiana State University, is the author of Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual.

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Price (paper): $26.95
Price (cloth): $34.95