"Tell Me a Riddle" became the title story of a volume of Olsen’s short stories
that also includes "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?,"
and "O Yes"; Time included Tell Me a Riddle on its
"best-ten-books" list in 1962. Tell Me a Riddle "went out of print
in 1963 or 1964 until 1971" but, as its devotees reported to Olsen, it "was kept
alive by being passed hand to hand and photocopied by teachers" (interview).
Since 1962 Olsen has worked at intervals within the academy, earning an impressive
number of appointments and awards. Her work has been anthologized more than 85 times and
published in 12 languages. But Olsen has remained politically active. In the spring of
1985, for example, along with writers Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
and Susan Griffin, she was cited at Berkeley’s Sproul Hall for protesting the
University of California’s investments in South Africa. And when I arrived at Olsen’s
apartment to interview her in July, 1989, I found her living room cluttered with the
placards she and others had recently carried while demonstrating against repression in
Beijing.
Olsen has also worked to restore eclipsed, out-of-print women’s writing. She
influenced several Feminist Press reprintings, including Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life
in The Iron Mills (1972), for which she wrote an extensive afterword, Agnes
Smedley’s Daughter of the Earth (1973); Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The
Yellow Wallpaper (1973); and Moa Martinson’s Women and Apple Trees (1985).
Olsen also reclaimed Yonnondio (1974)–the novel she had begun, as noted above, in
1932 and abandoned in 1937–by the arduous process described in Chapter 6.
And yet Yonnondio’s reclamation and "Requa I," a story included
in The Best American Short Stories, 1971, edited by Martha Foley, compose
the sum total of Olsen’s published fiction since Tell Me a Riddle appeared in 1961.
Silences (1978), a nonfictional testimonial to the factors–including gender,
class, and race–that obstruct literary productivity, derived partly from Olsen’s struggle
with her own silence. Informal literary criticism and literary history, Silences draws
on writers’ letters and diaries "to expand the too sparse evidence [about] the
relationship between circumstances and creation" (262 ). Olsen contributed the
foreword to Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate (1983) and edited Mother
to Daughter Daughter to Mother (1984), published by the Feminist Press as the first in
a series of books commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Press in
1970. The book is an unusual collection of 120 writers’ work, including diary entries,
letters, poetry, fiction, autobiography, memoirs, songs, and even gravestone epitaphs.
With Julie Olsen Edwards, Olsen published an introductory essay in Mothers and
Daughters: That Special Quality: An Exploration in Photographs (1989), and she
contributed "The ’30s: A Vision of Fear and Hope," a retrospective on the
decade, to a special anniversary issue of Newsweek, January 3, 1994.
From Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur.
New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Copyright ? 1995 by Oxford UP.