ABSTRACT
Tillie Olsen's career, spanning five decades, is something of an enigma, especially as it has been presented by herself in Silences, and by such biographers as Mickey Pearlman and Abby Werlock, Deborah Rosenfelt, Erika Duncan, and others. Born in 1912 or 1914 (the exact date has been lost) to Russian socialist immigrant parents in Nebraska, Olsen was the second of six children, an avid reader and participant in her parents' socialist discussions. Yet she dropped out of high school before completing twelfth grade. Although her father sometimes farmed, frequently held working-class jobs, he was, by all accounts, a conscious socialist working-class intellectual in a tradition that was to be hailed by both lenin and Trotsky as "worker-Bolshevik." He
himself was at the forefront of several mid-west strike actions and found himself, and his daughter Tillie along with him, in the company of IWW leader Big Bill Haywood and Eugene V. Debs. I do not want to minimize this radical-worker-intellectual tradition, especially among the immigrant socialist community in the period in America just before and after the Russian Revolution, because I think it can contribute much to our understanding of Olsen's writing career, if not to Yonnondio itself.
