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Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen

One Woman, Many Riddles

by Panthea Reid

Published by: Rutgers University Press

Imprint: Rutgers University Press

484 Pages, 156.00 × 235.00 × 25.00 mm, 25 illustrations. 25 photographs

Paperback
9780813551876
Published: August 2011

£32.00

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Praise

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.

"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. Reid paints a deftly engrossing, nuanced, and meticulously researched portrait of a perplexing, larger-than-life woman."
(Publishers Weekly (Starred Review))
"Reid sets out to interrogate the heroic feminist image that adorned Olsen in her last decades, to fill in the neglected, blurred, or falsified facts of her long life, and to answer riddles-most notably, 'why didn't Tillie write?'. An ambitious and obsessively well-researched biography."
(Women's Review of Books)
"Reid brings her extraordinarily complex and endlessly perplexing subject to vitally disarming life and her book provides substantively more for Olsenites than any previous attempt. Tillie Olsen is rich-and riddled with answers."
(Philadelphia Inquirer)
"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)
"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 (author of Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry)
"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)
"Reid concludes her book with a sense of conflicted loss. While she wept at Olsen's death, 'I have never adored Tillie,' she admits. Reverence hampers facts, she says, then adds, 'My biographer's obligation . . .is to tell the truth as artfully as possible and not to let love hamper honesty.' No wise reader could ask for anything more."
- Susan Comninos (Christian Science Monitor)
"Brilliant. Professor Reid sympathetically and critically describers the strengths and foibles of the iconic Olsen. Her intimate revelations are pertinent to Tillie's complex character."
(Jewish Press)
"Biographer Panthea Reid's extensive research reveals that some accounts of Olsen's life are more fable than fact. While Reid solves some riddles, she creates additional ones for admirers and scholars to ponder in the years ahead."
(Bloomsbury Review)
"Panthea Reid chronicles a journey for knowledge and social justice that spans the entire 20th century and follows the events that made the times momentous. Olsen is a biography of rare humanity. It is profoundly real. Reid has written a marvelously
evocative book."
(The Advocate)
"This book is well-researched and provides an in-depth look at Olsen's life.
Ried definitely knocks Olsen off any saintly pedestalÀbut she does this without lessening the impact of Olsen's work."
(Feminist Review)
"A remarkable amount of material on the life of Olsen. Students of Olsen's work will find this a valuable guide to the autobiographical roots of Olsen's fiction."
(Jewish Book World)
"Reid has succeeded in giving us a well-rounded and well-grounded picture of Tillie Olsen. This book is a major achievement in offering a balanced appraisal of Tillie Olsen, who was revered by some and reviled by others."
(National Jewish Post & Opinion)
"Superb and painstaking biography. Reid artfully depicts a tortured writer whose concern for oppressed masses often eclipsed her duty to intimates."
(Star-Ledger)
"Get ready for the unflinching, warts-and-all story of Tillie Lerner Olsen. Reid unwraps the riddle of Olsen's complex personality in this fascinating biography."
(Carolina Arts and Sciences Magazine)
"Great lives challenge and empower an intelligent, determined biographer. Tillie Olsen lived a great life to which Panthea Reid does full justice.
"
(Town Topics)
"A feminist icon, beloved of the left and also a superb delineator of what blocks writers from writing, Tillie Olsen is deserving of this penetrating biography, the first book to unravel the riddle of a life devoted to and tormented by writing."
(Kansas City Star)
"Panthea Reid's ten-year odyssey in writing a definitive biography of this enigmatic woman has been long awaited by western literature and history scholars alike. Tillie Olsen will delight readers."
(Western American Literature)