1B: Tillie Olsen (January 14, 1912 – January 1, 2007)

Tillie Olsen's hands

"The New York Times" obituary of Tillie Olsen, January 3, 2007:

"A daughter of immigrants and a working mother starved for time to write, Ms. Olsen drew from her personal experiences to create a small but influential body of work. Her first published book, “Tell Me a Riddle” (1961), contained a short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which the narrator painfully recounts her difficult relationship with her daughter and the frustrations of motherhood and poverty. To see the complete New York Times obituary for Olsen (1912-2007), see this site.

The Gray Panthers, in their 2007 newsletter, recalled Olsen's life as an "author, activist and role model par excellence for working women, [and who] died on New Year’s Day [2007]. She is best known for her book Tell Me a Riddle, which energized and inspired women writers in the feminist movement of the 1960s and since, for her life of active support for social justice and union rights, and for her determination to write and success in writing while working low-paying blue-collar jobs.  You can find the complete Gray Panthers reprint of the Progressive Magazine, November 1999, article on Olsen and interview with her here.

In an interview published on the Web site of 'Modern American Poetry,' Ms. Olson said, 'I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (for distribution). It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s great work.' For the past year the SF Gray Panthers Civil/Human Rights Committee has been campaigning to get the Declaration of Human Rights incorporated into the SF Charter and the California State Constitution. We salute Tillie Olson, an admirable woman." The Modern American Poetry website also reprints the Progressive Magazine, November 1999, article on Olsen and interview with her here. You'll find another interview with Olsen on that site as well. 

There is also the website http://www.tillieolsen.net/  with further information about Olsen.  Constance Coiner's overview of Olsen's life can be found here. News of Olsen's death was reported by the " Stanford Report", January 10, 2007.

Olsen in the 1940s

Tillie Olsen was interviewed by "The Progressive," November 1999. Here's an excerpt:

Q: How did you learn?

OLSEN: In the college of literature. What's in books--history, too. And the great college of motherhood. You learn so much about human development, human capacity. And it doesn't have to do with whether you have wealth and advantage or not. It has to do with the parenting those first few years before the world comes in with its enormous effect. The ecstasy of achievement when you first learn to walk, the passion for language. When children first learn to talk sentences, you usually can't shut them up. When they learn how to climb, for instance, again the ecstasy of achievement, that real hunger to learn, to have experiences, to be on top of something.

And the college of activism--that whole participation with others in trying to make change for the better. When I had only one child, I was already a labor activist. I did leaflets for unions in the old mimeograph days way back in 1932 and '33. And of course, '34 was the year when union organizations finally were really winning. The General Strike was my second-ever arrest. The city jail was just packed. We'd be serenaded every night from the men's section with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Q: How were you in school?

OLSEN: I had this real passion for books, although almost everything I read wasn't anything like the people I knew or the life around me. The marvel was, by imagining, I gained so much from [as Anna says in 'Yonnondio,'] 'being in places you've never been, inside people's heads you wouldn't ever get to know.' Without articulating it, I also learned I had something to add to literature. In study hall, instead of doing my work, I read because I didn't have much time otherwise. Ours was a large family [Olsen had five siblings, and she was the second oldest], and sometimes my mother worked outside. There was so much to be done.

We were poor. My mother used to buy chicken feet. And you'd have to chop off the nails. Then you'd scald them, then you'd peel them. Once, my daughter Julie was buying chicken feet for soup, so I told her about this. "You know, one doesn't always remember accurately. There's nothing to peel," she said. And I said: "Julie, when you buy them now, they're already peeled."

I remember when I first started high school and we were studying ancient history. My mother, who had never had formal education, was always curious about what we were learning. She said, "Tell me, what was good about slavery for humanity? I don't mean for the slaves themselves." I thought this was a crazy question. "What do you mean? Nothing is good about it." And she said, "No, think about it. What was good?"

Well, I really thought she'd lost it. I couldn't think of any answer. So she said, "Those who owned them had leisure." Not everybody used their leisure in the same way. People who were thinking were able to be philosophers, like Socrates, or playwrights, or sculptors. And she went on to the uses of literacy by a small number of humanity.

On some of the jobs my mother did she could bring along a couple kids. There were some where she couldn't, and then she worried. This was before child care.


It was the period before automatic dishwashers, and you washed clothes with the washboard. If you were lucky, you could get a wringer--what Walt Whitman called "the technological sublime." I really appreciated that phrase. I know there's a lot of scorn about these advances. But think of the enormous difference in time even having an electric dishwasher makes. I remember women in my generation saying, "It wasn't Lincoln who freed the slaves. It was the Bendix." The Bendix was the first automatic washing machine.

Olsen in 2001, two years after this interview was conducted.
 Photograph by Eric Risberg/Associated PressQ: Why do you write?

OLSEN: Because I'm a human being and human beings have a need to express themselves. Also, I stuttered. So I listened a lot, and there was a lot to listen to in my neighborhood. And there was the wonder of the black church, right around the corner. I loved that music so much, sometimes I'd go sit on the stairs. Once one of the women said, "Why don't you come up and sit in a real chair?" So I went in and came every Sunday I could.I also had luck because I was proud of my class--because of growing up with Socialist parents and having sat on Eugene V. Debs's lap and given him red roses. And hearing him. I remember how he said passionately, "You are not heads to them, brains that can think. You are not hearts to them, that can feel. You are hands." And he held up his hands. And he started, you know: "Cowhands, farmhands. . . ."  I was impressed again by the power of language.

Q: A lot of your fiction uses language as it is spoken.

OLSEN: Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know our country so much better.

Tolstoy was so excited, absolutely thrilled, when Maxim Gorky began to publish because he was writing working class. When he met Gorky, Tolstoy told him about the time he'd had this great night in Petersburg. It's winter, freezing, but he's had a night of gypsy music and women. He comes out, dressed warmly in his army great coat and fur hat, striding along, to use Thoreau's expression, "inhabiting his body with inexpressible satisfaction." He feels this tug at his coat. Here is this filthy little bare-legged kid trying to pull him back and pointing to this half-naked woman, vomit all over her, lying unconscious in the gutter. He brushes that kid aside. He has no intention of touching her, freezing to death though she may be. His beautiful mood is spoiled. Again the little boy, looking imploringly up at him, pulls at his coat. He pushes him away hard.

By this time, Tolstoy is crying, and he puts his arms on Gorky's shoulders, looks into his eyes. "And you," Tolstoy says, "you must keep writing what happens with the people who are not ever written about. Or else that little boy will follow you with his eyes all of your life as he does me.

For the complete interview, and it is definitely worth reading, go here.

Here is an excerpt from the film

 Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Action

There is also a wonderful interview with Tillie Olsen talking about "I Stand Here Ironing."  Go here to watch the video. 


Scott Thurow, novelist known for suspense mysteries, devoted an NPR report about his admiration for Tillie Olsen's writing.  You can read and listen to the program by clicking this.  At the same page there is an excerpt of her novella Tell Me a Riddle.

Amy Hempel was asked in a Paris Review interview about Olsen's influence on her writing. Hempel said "I love 'I Stand Here Ironing,' and I always use it when I teach because it’s such a technical feat—the way the story keeps opening up, following directly from the first line, from what is troubling this child, to her family, to many struggling families, to a nation in the Depression, and back to the original child, the last line answering the first line. It’s so well made."

Tillie Olsen, left, marching in protest with other opponents of apartheid
 in support of full divestment in South Africa by the University of California.
See more about Olsen at "Stanford University Report," January 10, 2007