Olsen Tillie - Tillie Olsen: one woman, many riddles

TILLIE OLSEN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reid, Panthea.

Tillie Olsen : one woman, many riddles / Panthea Reid.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-4637-7 (alk. paper)

1. Olsen, Tillie. 2. Women authors, American20th centuryBiography. I. Title.

PS3565.L82Z86 2010

813. 54dc22

2009006026

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Frontispiece/photograph by Jill Krementz; all rights reserved. [30 May 1977]

Copyright 2010 by Panthea Reid

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 088548099. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Permission to publish excerpts from her unpublished letters and papers granted by Tillie Olsen.

Permission to publish selected Tillie Olsens letters from The Tillie Olsen Papers (M0667) courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For John
Always

In the more than a decade I have spent writing about the long and complicated life of Tillie Olsen, I have accumulated many debts. The first is to my husband, John Irwin Fischer, who has been inconvenienced by but marvelously supportive of this project. As always, he is my very best, most meticulous reader and advisor. I also appreciate the help of my son Reid Broughton, the attorney who drew up my contract with Tillie Olsen, and my daughter, Hannah Fischer, of the Congressional Research Service, who uncovered some really obscure bits of information for me.

I am deeply indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for my 19992000 Fellowship for University Teachers, awarded to write this biography and edit a collection of Tillie Olsens letters. And I thank the College of Arts and Sciences and the English Department at Louisiana State University, which cooperated with the Endowment to free me of academic duties for an entire year to work on these projects.

I owe much to Tillie Olsen herself. Since 1997, she willingly endured my visits, letters, and phone calls and responded eagerly to my queries. Somewhat less eagerly she gave me permission to quote excerpts from and use information gleaned from her unpublished papers. Julie Olsen Edwards officially granted me access to all materials in the Tillie Olsen Archives. Julie Olsen Edwards, Kathie Olsen Hoye, and Laurie Olsen Margolis have sent me photos, shared memories, clarified details, and answered my almost endless queries. Tillies eldest daughter Karla Lutz chose not to be involved in this book. I respect her choice but regret not having her assistance. I am grateful for help from her daughter Jessica Lutz, from Julies husband and daughter Rob and Rebekah Edwards, and especially from Lauries husband Mike Margolis, who showed extraordinary patience with Tillie and with me.

Among Tillies siblings, Gene Lerner assisted me in the task of uncovering the European family background of the Lerners and Goldbergs. After interviewing his sisters in 2000, he shared their recollections with me; in 2001, he wrote From Czarist Russia to Omaha, Nebraska, and Beyond: The Story of the Lerner Family Over More Than One Hundred Years, now at Stanford. I spoke once with Jann Lerner Brodinsky, and she wrote me what may have been her last letter. Harry Lerner died before I began this work, but his children Howard and Susan have been most helpful. I exchanged many letters with Lillian Lerner Davis and interviewed her early in 2002 and have visited and corresponded with her daughters Caroline Eckhardt and Rivka Davis. Vicki Lerner Richards Bergman answered many questions and sent me copies of the letters, inscriptions on books, and articles on Tillie Olsen that Tillie sent her. Her son Cory Richards has also shared his recollections with me. Gretchen Spieler, great-niece of Abraham Jevons Goldfarb, has been most helpful in tracing family records and finding photographs.

My very special thanks go to William McPheron, William Saroyan Curator for British and American Literature at Stanford University Libraries. He and I cooperated on getting friends and family to donate their letters from Tillie to Stanford, letters on which I rely here and will use to edit the Selected Letters of Tillie Olsen. Over the years, McPheron answered my countless questions with care and grace and facilitated my access to the Tillie Olsen Papers and the Lerner Family Papers at Stanford.

Writers, artists, and friends who have been especially generous with their time include Sandy Boucher and Mary Anne Ferguson, who carefully annotated Tillies letters to them; Ann Hershey, who shared her experiences while she was filming Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Motion; Edith Konecky, who consulted old letters and diaries to help me date Tillies activities; Alice Walker, who entertained me and shared vivid recollections; Diane Wood Middlebrook, who gave me Tillies mark-up of her chapter on Anne Sexton and Tillie Olsen; Ruth Vance who drove me around San Francisco to view the many places where Tillie settled in her peripatetic life there; Ann Goette, who read several chapters with wit and insight; Leonda and Arnold Finke, who entertained me and my family with a sculpture tour. Three extraordinary women have been wonderfully supportive professionally and personally: Rosalie Siegel, my agent; Lisa Jerry, my copyeditor; and Leslie Mitchner, editor-in-chief at Rutgers University Press. My thanks to Rosalie, Lisa, and Leslie, as well as the presss efficient and responsive staff.

In choosing illustrations, I have preferred to use previously unseen (or rarely seen) photographs and also ones that tell a story. Here my friend Al Aronson has offered invaluable help. He carefully took illustrations I provided that came from old glossy photos, e-mail attachments, museum and library records, and even a 1934 newspaper clipping and assembled them into a visual narrative of clear and telling pictures.

I thank Roberto Trujillo, head of Special Collections at Stanford, Annette Keogh, who has taken William McPherons position on his retirement, Mattie Taormina, head of Public Service, and the wonderfully helpful librarians Polly Armstrong, Glynn Edwards, and Joe Geller. My list of other librarians and staff members who have been most helpful must begin with Bill Lynch of the Magazine and Newspaper Center at the San Francisco Public Library, who uncovered countless newspaper articles and photos for me, and Jane Knowles, archivist of Radcliffes Schlesinger Library, for tracking down photos, clippings, and previously lost sources.

I will not try to distinguish between archivists who answered a few queries and those who answered many, but my thanks go to the following: Kathy Kienholz of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Peter A. Nelson at Amherst College; Jane Parkinson at Banff; Genevieve Troka of the California State Archives; Barbara Miller at California State University, Fullerton; Jean Ashton of Columbia University; John E. Haynes of the Library of Congress; Leonard Greenspoon and Fran Minear of Creighton University; Cristina Favretto at Duke University; Michael Lampen at Grace Cathedral; Sandra Taylor of the Lilly Library, Indiana University; Mary Fellman and Dotty Rosenblum at the Jewish Community Center, Omaha; Susan E. King at Jewishgen.org; Glenna Dunning of the Los Angeles Public Library; Elizabeth Michael, Joe Bills, and Brendan Tapley at the MacDowell Colony; Robert Machesney at Macmillan, United Kingdom; Mike Milewski at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Tracey Baker of the Minnesota Historical Society; Thomas M. Verich and Jennifer Ford at the University of Mississippi; Tom Bickley of the National Endowment for the Arts; Jane Aikin of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Oliver Pollak of the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society; Julie Cobb of the Newberry Library; Stephen Crooks, Philip Milito, and Isaac Gewirtz at the New York Public Library; Geoffrey D. Smith at Ohio State University; Bonnie Marcus of Poets and Writers; Jane Knowles, Renny Harrigan, Jennifer Lyons, Sophia Heller, and Jeanne Winner at Radcliffe; Alycia Vivona of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library; Tom Carey at the San Francisco Public Library; Lynn Bonfield, Jeff Rosen, and Susan Sherwood at San Francisco State University; Wendy Bousfield at Syracuse University Library; Daniel Traister at the University of Pennsylvania; AnnaLee Pauls of the Princeton University Library; Cathy Henderson and Tara Wenger at the University of Texas, Austin; Amy Coenen of Womens Liberation Studies Archives for Action; Steve Siegel, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA; John Lennox and Sean Smith at York University.