Tillie Olsen, an activist, feminist and an influential and widely taught fiction writer who narrated and experienced some of the major social conflicts of the 20th century, died Monday night, two weeks before her 95th birthday.
A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Olsen had been in failing health for years, her daughter, Laurie Olsen, told The Associated Press. Tillie Olsen died at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, Calif.
The AP's Hillel Italie recounts Olsen's legacy:
Politically active and class conscious, joined to the world as if every soul were a soul mate, Olsen countered the literary myths of her male peers. She did not immortalize the cowboy or the outlaw, but the woman who stayed home. For her characters, the open road did not lead to freedom, but only to the next job.
...She published just two works of fiction – "Tell Me a Riddle" and "Yonnondio" – but she was well known among writers, teachers and feminists, her friends and fans including Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood and Grace Paley.
One of Olsen's peers explained the reasons for her sparse ouevre:
Margaret Atwood attributed Ms. Olsen’s relatively small output to her full life as a wife and mother, a "grueling obstacle course" experienced by many writers.
"She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both."
Olsen's lifepath encompassed dramatic moments in the early 20th century social justice movement:
It was during the Depression that Ms. Olsen began work as an activist for social and labor causes, joining the Young Communist League and organizing packinghouse workers in Kansas and Nebraska. She contracted pleurisy and tuberculosis working in a factory, and while recovering, began to write her first book, "Yonnondio: From the Thirties."
In 1933 she moved to San Francisco, where she would live for more than 70 years, and resumed her pro-labor activities. During the 1934 San Francisco general strike, she was arrested, and promptly chronicled the strike in The New Republic and The Partisan Review.
Yet it is her deeply personal and moving stories for which she will be most remembered. My first introduction to her astonishing talent came as a college freshman decades ago, when I read her seminal story "Tell Me A Riddle" one rainy afternoon in literature class...
FOR FORTY-SEVEN YEARS they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say-- but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even to the children, long since grown.
Why now, why now? wailed Hannah.
As if when we grew up weren't enough, said Paul.
Poor Ma. Poor Dad. It hurts so for both of them, said Vivi. They never had very much; at least in old age they should be happy.
Knock their heads together, insisted Sammy; tell 'em: you're too old for this kind of thing; no reason not to get along now.
Lennie wrote to Clara: They've lived over so much together; what could possibly tear them apart?
Something tangible enough.
Arthritic hands, and such work as he got, occasional. Poverty all his life, and there was little breath left for running. He could not, could not turn away from this desire: to have the troubling of responsibility, the fretting with money, over and done with; to be free, to be carefree where success was not measured by accumulation, and there was use for the vitality still in him.
By the end of this deeply felt tone poem about the twilight journey of an elderly married couple, I had been moved, most unexpectedly, to tears. It was an early experience of the power of literature to catalyze an almost overwhelming empathy for the overlooked figure by penetrating the dim hallways of their quietly struggling hearts. Tillie Olsen spoke for the burdens of many women; our ancestors, our friends, our mothers.
One of those she spoke for writes eloquently of Olsen's impact on her own life:
If someone had told me I would climb the emotional and spiritual equivalent of Mount Everest to reach the place where I am today as a writer and a mother, I probably would have balked like a blind horse. Yet Tillie's writing was part of the rope that kept me tethered to sanity and strength. My copy of Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother is stained, drawn on by children, the edges brown and dogeared, the cover wrinkled and torn. It has, for many years, been a heart's guidebook; like a guidebook taken on a lifelong journey, it shows its age and use.
So this is a word of love and farewell to Tillie Olsen, a farewell full of gratitude for a life generously and abundantly lived. I'd like to finish by quoting the very last bit of a story she published in her daybook about the passing of her own mother, entitled Dream-Vision:
"She who had no worldly goods to leave, yet left to me an inexhaustible legacy. Inherent in it, this heritage of summoning resources to make — out of song, food, warmth, expressions of human love — courage, hope, resistance, belief; this vision of universality, before the lessenings, harms, divisions of the world are visited upon it.
She sheltered and carried that belief, that wisdom — as she sheltered and carried us, and others — throughout a lifetime lived in a world whose season was, as still it is, a time of winter."
Rest in Peace, Tillie Olsen.