A couple of weeks ago, I hosted an event at the 92nd Street Y with the writer Alice Mattison. When asked about her favorite writers, Mattison’s short list included Tillie Olsen, the author of Tell Me a Riddle and Silences.
Olsen, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in Nebraska, was also a labor activist and pioneering feminist. She died on Monday at the age of 94.
You can read Olsen’s New York Times obituary, here.
Other resources:
– Tillie Olsen on Wikipedia
– Scott Turow on Tillie Olsen on NPR
– Reading list for a class on “The Literature of Poverty, Oppression, Revolution, and the Struggle for Freedom” that Tillie Olsen taught at Amherst College in 1969.
