Remembering Tillie Olsen

T illie Lerner was never supposed to be a writer. She grew up poor. She dropped out of high school. She was a teenage mother. She worked long hours to support her kids. She got fired. Too often, she recalled, “the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” Yet, she wrote. 

On January 1, 2007, Tillie Olsen, writer, teacher, and icon of literary feminism, died in Oakland, California. Olsen, safely bound between the covers of high school English textbooks, will never be forgotten. But she would be disappointed if readers didn’t remember also Tillie Lerner, the dreamer and fighter, inseparable from the writer she became. 

Tillie Lerner’s world was one of broken dreams and lost fights. Her parents, radical socialists, fled Russia’s failed 1905 revolution and ended up on a Nebraska farm where Tillie was born in either 1912 or 1913 (“no birth certificate seems to exist,” she once reflected). By 1917, Sam, Ida, and the six Lerner children had moved to Omaha, a meatpacking metropolis home to working immigrants and open-shop factory floors. A failed strike in the packinghouses in 1922 had broken the city’s unions. 

Her father brought home socialist pamphlets and a modest income from a confectionery, but Tillie said it was her mother who “made me a revolutionary writer.” As an adult, she saw her mother only three times; distance, money, and mothering demands made cross-country trips impossible. But the absent Ida Lerner haunts her daughter’s writings for reasons that emerge from a letter Ida wrote to her teacher at an English-language night school in 1924: “I am glad to study with ardor but the children wont let me, they go to bed late so it makes me tired, and I cant do my lesson. It is after ten o’clock my head dont work it likes to have rest.” 

By all accounts Tillie grew into a funny, lively teenager and a voracious reader, but in 1931 she walked away from her senior year at Omaha Central High School as the gray pallor of the Depression began to settle over the Midwest. Rejecting her parents’ moderate socialism, Tillie joined the Young Communist League and after Party school (and her first arrest) in Kansas City, she returned to Omaha. Within a year, she found herself in Faribault, Minnesota, pregnant, mostly alone, stricken with incipient tuberculosis, and starting a novel. She was 19. 

Somehow she made her way to California and it must have seemed a sunny place indeed. Not only for the weather, but for the radical community she found soon after moving there in 1933, including a young communist organizer named Jack Olsen, who became her partner (and later, her husband) after they met during San Francisco’s 83-day waterfront strike in 1934. She also discovered a place for herself as a woman radical, energetically teaching a class on the “Woman Question” at the Young Communist League’s headquarters on Haight Street. 

The 1930s were “a time of women acting, women working, organizing, effecting changes. It was a different left from that of the 1960s, one imbued with different attitudes and consciousness about women,” she told Ms. magazine in 1974. To be sure, the Communist Party viewed women’s oppression through the lens of class and Olsen remembered being censured for ironing during CP Women’s Commission meetings. But the Party opened a space for the Woman Question. More importantly for Olsen, it urged working-class men and women to create a new socialist art. 

Tillie heard that message loud and clear and in 1934 her first poems and a short story appeared in local party publications and then in the inaugural issue of Partisan Review. Her authentic worker’s credentials and vivid style captured the imagination of the New York literary world at a time when radical writing was not only politically important, but commercially viable. Publishers tried to track her down, but initially they had no luck as Lerner had been jailed on vagrancy charges after San Francisco police raided a communist office. 

Her arrest made her a cause célèbre. New York radicals chaired a protest meeting after her arrest, literary agents scoured Haight Street, and Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, urged her to write of her jailhouse experiences. Published in the New Republic in August 1934, “Thousand-Dollar Vagrant” brandished the radical tough talk that filled the air that summer and caught the ear of Bennett Cerf, editor at Random House. He offered Lerner the monthly stipend she needed to finish her novel and she gave it a shot, shipping her young daughter off to relatives and moving away from San Francisco’s political maelstrom to write in rented rooms in Los Angeles. But she hated being alone and she never fit in with the Hollywood radicals she met there. Within months, she mailed her checks back to Cerf, set the novel aside, and headed to Stockton to organize asparagus pickers. 

In 1972 Jack Olsen found the first chapters of Tillie’s novel in an attic  and Tillie Olsen finally published Yonnondio in 1974, largely unfinished. “The book,” she wrote, “ceased to be solely the work of that long ago young writer and, in arduous partnership, became this older one’s as well.” The novel takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem about Native Americans and the poet’s urgent call, “unlimn’d they disappear,” sprawls across the book’s first page. The unlimned, in Yonnondio’s case, are the Holbrooks, a family of farmers who abandoned their Wyoming coal mining town for a South Dakota farm, and, eventually, the shabby corner of a meatpacking city that looked (and smelled) much like Omaha. 

That lesson stayed with her all her life. “I want to write what will help change that which is harmful for human beings in our time,” she once explained. In fact, Olsen only stopped writing in her final years as her health declined. In the 1970s, when admiring younger women wrote about her, they referred to Yonnondio as Olsen’s “first novel,” a slip that revealed more about their own hopes than the author’s accomplishments. With her death this year at the age of 94, we now know that there will never be a second. A collection of short stories, a half-finished novel, and some essays. Yet, as Olsen once wrote, “There is still enough to live by.”