Tillie Olsen, who was a chronicler of working class, dies at age 94

WASHINGTON — Tillie Olsen, a chronicler of the working class whose few published works included some of the most critically acclaimed stories in modern American literature, died Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at an Oakland, Calif., hospital. She was 94.

Ms. Olsen, a resident of Berkeley, Calif., was nearly 50 when her first book, the short-story collection "Tell Me a Riddle," was published in 1961. She had been writing for years, but sporadic Depression-era jobs, her political activism and the demands of motherhood often took precedence. She wrote at night after her children were asleep or while riding a bus to work — as a waitress, a capper of mayonnaise jars and a "Kelly Girl" temp, among many other tedious jobs.

In 1934, when an excerpt of her novel-in-progress about the Depression came out in the Partisan Review, she listed in an author's note additional jobs: tie presser, hack writer, model, housemaid, ice-cream packer, book clerk. The novel, "Yonnondio: From the Thirties," was published nearly four decades after the Partisan Review excerpt, and only after Ms. Olsen rediscovered bits and pieces of it among old papers.

"Tell Me a Riddle" and "Yonnondio" (1973) were her only published works of fiction. Both met with critical acclaim, as did "Silences" (1978), a memoir of her years as a struggling writer and an exploration of the forces that silence "those whose working hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women."

"Few writers have gained such wide respect on such a small body of published work," novelist Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Times Book Review, noting that for female writers "reverence" for Ms. Olsen was a more apt word. "This is presumably because women writers, even more than their male counterparts, recognize what a heroic feat it is to have held down a job, raised four children and still somehow managed to become and to remain a writer."

Tillie Lerner was born Jan. 14, 1912, on a tenant farm near Wahoo, Neb., the second of six children of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had fled their homeland after being involved in the failed 1905 revolution.

Ms. Olsen was strongly influenced by Midwestern farm life. "I learned a lot being around cows," she recalled in 2002. "It seemed to me they were so damned patient."

She dropped out of high school after the 11th grade and began her long succession of dead-end jobs. "Public libraries were my sustenance and my college," she wrote.

An activist and a member of the Young Communist League, she went to jail for organizing packinghouse workers in the Midwest. She began "Yonnondio" while recovering from pleurisy and tuberculosis contracted because of poor ventilation in the tie factory where she worked.

In San Francisco, during the 1934 West Coast longshoremen's strike, she was jailed along with Jack Olsen, a waterfront warehouseman and union organizer who became her lifelong partner. They were married from 1944 until his death in 1989.

Between 1969 and 1974, she taught at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts, Kenyon College and Amherst College. Her reading lists and syllabuses, published by the Feminist Press, helped restore to print a number of forgotten books by women and working-class writers.

Survivors include three daughters from her marriage, Julie Olsen Edwards of Santa Cruz, Calif., Kathie Olsen of Jacksonville, Ore., and Laurie Olsen of Berkeley; a daughter from a previous relationship, Karla Lutz of Larkspur, Calif.; a sister; eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.