I Stand Here Ironing (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Tillie Olsen was born in 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish immigrants whose political activities had forced them to leave their homeland in 1905. During her childhood, Olsen’s father was the state secretary of the Socialist Party, and she likewise became politically active at an early age by joining the Young Communist League. After high school, she worked menial jobs until she was jailed in Kansas City for attempting to organize packinghouse workers into a union.

By 1933, Olsen had moved to California where she resumed her union activities and began writing articles for left-wing publications. She had one daughter from her first marriage to a man who promptly abandoned his young family. In 1936 she married Jack Olsen and spent the next twenty years raising three daughters while working full time as a factory worker and a secretary. Most of her short fiction dates to the 1950s, when her youngest child entered school and she was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University.

Critical acclaim followed the publication of Tell Me a Riddle in 1961, the same year the title story won the O. Henry Award for best short story. The works in the collection revolve around a central theme: how external forces undermine the ambitions of individuals. For example, in “I Stand Here Ironing” a mother laments the fact that her young daughter’s creative talent will be squandered because of the family’s limited income. The award-winning title story, “Tell Me a Riddle,” concerns David and Eva, a Jewish immigrant couple married for forty-seven years, and the compromises and disappointments Eva has endured to satisfy her family. The book quickly became a favorite among participants in the fledgling women’s movement.

Olsen’s only novel, Yonnondio, was published in 1974, though it takes place in the 1930s. The novel is narrated by six-year-old Mazie Holbrook who tells of the harsh life of her impoverished family. The socialist concepts of the exploited proletariat and capitalism’s damaging effects on family life are prominent in the novel, echoing the author’s lifelong activism in leftist causes.

In 1978, Olsen published a book called Silences which contains two long essays; one on the silenced voices of women writers, the other concerning how writers confront periods of silence in their own lives. Though the book received less attention than

Olsen’s fiction, it augments the small body of work for which she has received much praise. Olsen has lectured at many universities, including the University of California at Los Angeles, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to receiving several honorary degrees, her stories, including “I Stand Here Ironing,” have appeared in more than one hundred anthologies.