Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen (born January 14, 1912, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died January 1, 2007, Oakland, California) was an American writer and social activist known for her powerful fiction about the inner lives of the working poor, women, and minorities. Her interest in long-neglected women authors inspired the development of academic programs in women’s studies, especially at the university level in the United States.

During her lifetime Olsen gained considerable fame, particularly among scholars. The American Academy of Arts and Letters cited Olsen in 1975 for creating a freshly poetic form of fiction. She held nine honorary doctorates, and she won grants from the Ford (1959–61) and Guggenheim (1975) foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts (1967), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1983), as well as countless residencies at artists’ colonies. Yet she never finished high school, and her modest output and complicated relationship with her own past have generated a mixed legacy.

Early life and influences

Tillie Lerner was the second child of Ida Goldberg and Sam Lerner, who had been members of the Bund, a largely Jewish and socialist self-defense league founded in 1897 that sought to end injustice and the brutal pogroms of tsarist Russia. Both lived in what is today Minsk voblasts (province), Belarus, and each played a part in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Samuel Lerner was arrested and faced death or exile in Siberia before he escaped to England, where he quickly picked up the language before immigrating to New York City in 1906. Hashka Goldberg followed him in 1907 and was given the name Ida by immigration officials. By 1908 they had moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where Sam Lerner’s maternal relatives lived. In 1913–16 they made an unsuccessful attempt at farming on the Nebraska plains. At the end of 1916 they returned to North Omaha, a neighbourhood filled with eastern European, mostly Jewish, immigrants. Though Ida and Sam never married, they had six children between 1910 and 1921. They remained reformists as members of the Workmen’s Circle, an organization akin to the Bund.

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In Omaha, Tillie Lerner entered Kellom Elementary School in 1917. She was a brilliant, though wild, child and moved rapidly through the first eight grades, transferring to Long School in 1921 and graduating at the end of 1924. She entered Omaha’s Central High School in January 1925 and within a year began a humour column that earned her popularity as well as notoriety. Her free spirit led her to sexual experimentation at age 15 and an unintended pregnancy at 16. In April 1928 she withdrew from school, citing “illness,” before having an abortion. She later returned, but on April 30, 1929, she left Central without graduating; it remains unclear whether she withdrew or was expelled.

Though deeply influenced by her parents’ socialist values, Tillie Lerner began to live independently of them. At the beginning of 1930 she joined the Young Communist League. Her parents detested bolshevism, but she came to revere communism, especially as practiced by several men, including Abraham Jevons Goldfarb, who took her to Stockton, California, where his parents lived, the day after her 18th birthday. She spent the rest of 1930 crusading for the Communist Party of the United States in the Midwest. In 1931, on Valentine’s Day, in Reno, Nevada, she married Goldfarb. They lived in Stockton until the autumn, when they returned to the Midwest. While attending a communist training school in Kansas City, Kansas, Tillie Lerner was arrested late in 1931 for fomenting worker protests. During her incarceration she contracted what probably was pleurisy or incipient tuberculosis.

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Early in 1932, illness purchased her release. Goldfarb took her first to Omaha, where her picture appeared in a local newspaper, identified by an alias with the initials TL. Goldfarb then took her to Faribault, Minnesota, where his sister offered a commodious and peaceful residence where Tillie Lerner Goldfarb began to recover and to write.

Early writing

Tillie Lerner’s high-school humour column exhibited her exuberant wit, and her poems—often profound, sometimes maudlin—illustrate considerable sophistication. While in high school, she also began a story about a character called Fuzzy who, like the story’s author, had an abortion. In Faribault in 1932 she began a novel about a family experiencing the deprivations and indignities of poor workers in Great Depression-ravaged America. She was inspired not only by contemporary proletarian novels but by past women authors who had written about the sufferings of women and the poor. Work on her novel, however, was interrupted by Communist Party activities and pregnancy. On December 20, 1932, a daughter was born to Tillie Lerner and Abe Goldfarb; they named her Karla (after Karl Marx) Barucha Goldfarb. In the autumn of 1933 the family moved back to Stockton, where a sister-in-law cared for Karla while Tillie worked on her novel and was her husband’s part-time secretary in the Civil Works Administration, a U.S. government program designed to ease poverty with decent-paying jobs.

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After hearing a young longshoreman named Jack Olsen call for a major strike on San Francisco’s waterfront, Tillie and Abe Goldfarb moved there to help support the strikers. Under her maiden name she submitted two angry political poems to the Partisan magazine and the Daily Worker newspaper, which accepted them immediately, and she sent a chapter of her novel to the Partisan Review. That journal published the beginning of her novel as a story called “The Iron Throat.” From May 1934 she wrote skits and songs and typed up fliers and newsletters for the strike, which soon shut down all West Coast shipping. She and a group of activists that included Olsen were arrested on July 22, 1934. She was jailed under another alias, again using the initials TL, so that when an article in The New Republic hailed “The Iron Throat” as a work of “early genius,” few knew that the young woman in San Francisco’s city jail was its author. After nationwide publicity revealed her identity and secured her release, she wrote powerful articles on her arrest and the strike for The New Republic and the Partisan Review. After intense competition between publishing houses for her novel, she signed with Random House, which in 1934–36 paid her handsome advances. But she failed to submit a finished novel.