Olsen, Tillie

Biography

Tillie Olsen was born in Nebraska in 1913 and has lived in San Francisco for most of her life. Her education was cut short by the Depression: she wrote and published when young, but the necessity of raising and supporting four children and full-time work prevented her from writing for twenty years. She was in her mid-forties before she began again. Tell Me A Riddle was originally published in 1962, and its title novella received the O. Henry Award as the best American story of 1961. In 1974, forty years after part of its chapter appeared in an early Partisan Review, her 'lost' novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, was published. Tillie Olsen has taught at Amherst College, Stanford University, was Writer-in-Residence at Massachustts Institute of Technology, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute. She has received both a Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her first work of non-fiction, Silences, was published in 1979.

From the guide to the Olsen, Tillie. Papers, 1930-1990, (Stanford University. Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.)