Yonnondio

Yonnondio PDF

Author: Tillie Olsen

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2004-10-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780803286214

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Yonnondio follows the heartbreaking path of the Holbrook family in the late 1920s and the Great Depression as they move from the coal mines of Wyoming to a tenant farm in western Nebraska, ending up finally on the kill floors of the slaughterhouses and in the wretched neighborhoods of the poor in Omaha, Nebraska. Mazie, the oldest daughter in the growing family of Jim and Anna Holbrook, tells the story of the family's desire for a better life – Anna's dream that her children be educated and Jim's wish for a life lived out in the open, away from the darkness and danger of the mines. At every turn in their journey, however, their dreams are frustrated, and the family is jeopardized by cruel and indifferent systems.

Tell Me a Riddle

Tell Me a Riddle PDF

Author: Tillie Olsen

Publisher: Delta

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 9780440550105

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This collection of four stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, what Ship?," "O Yes," and "Tell me a Riddle," had become an American classic. Since the title novella won the O. Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important - once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.

Tell Me a Riddle

Tell Me a Riddle PDF

Author: Tillie Olsen

Publisher: Laurel

Published: 1961

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780440385738

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This collection of four stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, what Ship?," "O Yes," and "Tell me a Riddle," had become an American classic. Since the title novella won the O. Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important - once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.

Silences

Silences PDF

Author: Tillie Olsen

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Published: 2014-07-22

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1558618791

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A landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them—from the influential activist and author of Tell Me a Riddle. With this groundbreaking work, Olsen revolutionized the study of literature by shedding critical light on the writings of marginalized women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors’ letters and diaries, Olsen shows us the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class, or race, has been suppressed through the years. Olsen recounts the torments of Herman Melville, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and the struggles of Olsen’s personal heroine Virginia Woolf, the greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that worked to silence her. First published in 1978, Silences expanded the literary canon and the ways readers engage with literature. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen’s classic reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction. Bracing and prescient, Silences remains “of primary importance to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves” (Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review). “A valuable book, an angry book, a call to action.” —Maxine Hong Kingston “Silences helped me to keep my sanity many a day.” —Gloria Naylor, author of Mama Day “[Silences is] ‘the Bible.’ I constantly return to it.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street “Silences will, like A Room of One’s Own, be quoted where there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible.” —Adrienne Rich, author of Diving into the Wreck

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen PDF

Author: Panthea Reid

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2009-12-10

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780813548135

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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.

Tell Me a Riddle & Yonnondio

Tell Me a Riddle & Yonnondio PDF

Author: Tillie Olsen

Publisher: Virago Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 9781853811685

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Tillie Olsen carved a permanent place in American literature on the strength of a single book, TELL ME A RIDDLE in 1962. This collection was widely hailed as a work of genius, in which the voices of ordinary Americans, black and white, male and female, were given their own rhythms and forms of expression. YONNONDIO, Olsen's only novel, was begun during the depression and completed in 1974. It tells the story of the Hollbrooks, an itinerant working-class family in middle-America during the thirties. Brutalised by poverty, they struggle to find a space to breathe, to dream and to create a bettter life for their children. Told in compelling, haunting prose, it is a profound and timeless story of the human will to survive.

Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen

Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen PDF

Author: Mara Faulkner

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780813914176

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Tillie Olsen's fiction and nonfiction portray, with all their harsh contours, the lives of people who cannot speak for themselves or whose words have been forgotten or ignored. Olsen's writing is neither serene nor despairing. In this sensitive thematic reading, Mara Faulkner shows that its most subversive function is the assertion that human life can be other than and more than it is. Olsen's promise of full creative life aims to make her readers forever dissatisfied with physical, emotional, and intellectual starvation. Faulkner finds in Olsen's writing a triple-layered pattern combining protest against oppression (blight), celebration of courage and strength (fruit), and the heartening dream of a radically transformed future world (possibility). She focuses on four of Olsen's main themes - motherhood, the relationship between men and women, community, and language - and shows how, because of social and economic circumstances, potentially creative tensions become destructive contradictions: motherhood stifles women's lives, patriarchy and poverty turn men into enemies of women and children, communities force their members into betrayal, and language distorts or erases human experience. Olsen reveals, according to Faulkner, the overlapping oppressions of class, race, gender, nationality, education, and age that both link people and set them apart. Yet, she refuses to exalt suffering and deprivation. In this comprehensive examination of a literature of social consciousness, Faulkner approaches Olsen's works within their historical, social, and political contexts without treating them as propaganda. In fact, she shows that it is Olsen's compressed, poetic style that gives her writing itsrevolutionary power. She illuminates both the author's individual talent and the traditions in which her works were created - traditions of women writers of color, writers of the working class, and writers who were immigrants or children of immigrants.