Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Action

Ann Hershey's documentary on the life and career of short story writer and feminist literature scholar Tillie Olsen (1914-2007) offers an invigorating biographical profile set against periods of dramatic social upheaval. The daughter of Russian socialists who emigrated to Nebraska, Olsen dropped out of high school in her senior year and became active in Communist Youth League activities. Drifting to San Francisco in the early 1930s, she was marginally involved in the 1934 strike that paralyzed the city and led to violent civil unrest. In the post-WWII years, her husband—a teacher with pronounced Communist leanings—could not gain employment in the educational field and had to find lower-paying work as a printer, while Olsen herself took a secretarial position to help support their three daughters. Yet Olsen's literary talent—which combined uncommonly sensitive observations of maternal experiences with sharp condemnations of casual racism and sexism—slowly found an audience by the early 1960s, and is credited as being one of the sparks that lit the modern feminist movement (Gloria Steinem was among Olsen's admirers). Olsen's effort to recover long-forgotten works by 19th-century female writers has been cited as an important contribution to preserving American cultural history. Mostly filmed in the early part of this decade (prior to Olsen's succumbing to Alzheimer's disease), Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Action finds the writer at numerous readings (offering passages from such classic short stories as “Tell Me a Riddle” and “I Stand Here Ironing”), as well as speaking at length with frankness and humor about her life (one of her crowning achievements, she feels, is having a race horse named after her). A wonderful vehicle for encouraging a new generation to seek out Olsen's writing, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)