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Tillie Olsen
Price: $34.95
Subtitle: One Woman, Many
Riddles
Author:
Panthea Reid
Subject: Literary
Studies, Women's
Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4637-7
Pages:
464 pages
Publication Date:
January
2010
Praise:
"A biographical bombshell. Reid's
meticulous research undoes the feminist legend of Saint Tillie and
replaces it with a complex, even-handed account of a passionate, often
devious, and always ideological woman writer."-Elaine Showalter, author
of A Jury
of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie
Proulx
"Panthea Reid tells an enthralling,
complicated story of a maddening, charismatic writer; her
self-creation, self-destruction, and self-promotion; and her profound
social commitments."-Patricia Meyer Spacks, the author, most recently,
of Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry.
“The first comprehensive account of the extraordinary life of one of
the 20th Century’s most exalted writers. Compelling reading.”-Scott
Turow, author of Presumed Innocent
"Panthea Reid's quest for the truth
about the courageous, egotistical, generous, maddening, and difficult
Tillie Olsen is downright heroic. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles
is biography at its fascinating best."-Valerie Martin, author of The Confessions of Edward Day
"An enthralling portrait of a vastly
talented but famously underperforming writer. Tillie Olsen drove
editors wild waiting in vain for her to deliver not excuses but
greatness. I should know. One of them was my father."-Rob Cowley,
Writer, Editor, and Anthologist
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.
About the Author:
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: $34.95
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