By the same age she had become a youthful Communist, a member of the Young Communist League
.
Mantel, Hilary. Giving up the Ghost. Fourth Estate, 2003.
133
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
Cultural formation
Tillie Olsen
TO
famously categorized herself: Race, human; Religion, none.
qtd. in
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
6
Her parents were politically active Russian Jewish immigrants, and did not become naturalized American citizens until Tillie was seven. By that age, she and her siblings...
Education
Hilary Mantel
She started her new school with a new name, HM
, as if her stepfather had actually married her mother. By the time she was sixteen, she had left Catholicism and supported the Young Communist League
.
Mantel, Hilary. Giving up the Ghost. Fourth Estate, 2003.
133
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
271
Occupation
Tillie Olsen
Some of her jobs after leaving highschool were alienatingly bourgeois, like working in an antiquarian bookstore. Other casual paid work was less important in her life than her speaking on behalf of the Young Communist League
politics
Tillie Olsen
Before she left school Tillie parted company with her father over politics. He was now a leading Omaha Socialist; the Communists were accusing the Socialists of pandering to capitalism; Tillie sided with the Communists
...
Textual Features
Tillie Olsen
TO
wrote about her arrest and trial for vagrancy at about the time when she received a huge publisher's advance for her novel in progress. She made this into a story for the New Republic...