Tillie Olsen

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TO , one of the leading lights of the twentieth-century feminist movement in the USA, prided herself on being a proletarian writer. She published very few books: a short-story volume, a novel, a book of essays, jottings and quotations about the silencing of writers, and an anthology on mothers and daughters. It is unusual for such a slim output to have such a profound effect on a generation of readers. TO was prolific, though, in poetry and political (pro-Communist) journalism and speeches during the 1930s and much later in essays and lectures, many of them about forgotten women writers.
Photograph of Tillie Olsen, shown from the shoulders up, wearing a black turtleneck and a necklace of small red, blue, and white beads. Her hair is short, grey, and sticking straight up from her head.

Milestones

14 January 1912

Tybile Lerner (later TO ) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the second child in a family of six.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
7, 13

Late February 1974

Yonnondio: From the Thirties, TO 's first and only novel, was published, though incomplete. Having worked on it during the 1930s and abandoned it, she was able to recover it in a somewhat fragmentary form.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
263
Book Review Index. Gale Research.
4 (1969-1979): 355

15 April 1974

To mark the publication of TO 's Yonnondio, Lola Sladitz mounted an exhibition of manuscripts at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library .
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
263-4

New Year's Day 2007

TO died in residential care.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
336

Biography

She confessed to only two of her three successive surnames, and as a teenager she had a long list of nicknames.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
3

Birth and Background

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