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| Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles
ISBN: 9780813548135
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Rutgers University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Olsen Tillie; Women authors American -- 20th century -- Biography;
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. The author of the celebrated stories "I Stand Here Ironing" and "Tell Me a Riddle" was, according to Reid, an imperious narcissist who used her charisma to cover her inadequacies. But Reid also presents Olsen's life as a metaphor for the 20th century, encompassing Communist activism, WWII patriotism, early feminism, and civil rights activism. Olsen (1912-2007), born in Omaha, Neb., to poor Russian Jewish immigrants, displayed early on a magnetic personality, verbal prowess, and what would become a lifelong habit of lying. A Communist during the 1930s, Olsen was thrust into the limelight after being jailed during a San Francisco dockworkers' strike. Putting the Party before personal loyalties, she neglected her daughter, was unfaithful to her husband, and took an advance from Random House without delivering a novel. A second marriage to fellow Communist Jack Olsen was happier, but sputtered as she finally tried to publish a book in 1974. Reid, author of biographies of Faulkner and Woolf, paints a deftly engrossing, nuanced, and meticulously researched portrait of a perplexing, larger-than-life woman. Photos. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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. |
