Messing Up the Drawing Room: Wharton, Olsen, and the Quest for Validation

by Jessica Levine

In retrospect, I see the nine years I spent working on my Ph.D. as a similar kind of detour, a quest for a lineage that might give me a right to speak. Continue reading →

In Her Own Words: Tillie Olsen

by Vicraj Gill

“The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.” Continue reading →

Tillie Olsen and the Writing of Fiction

by Alice Mattison

Like the family I grew up in—my parents were the children of immigrant secular Jews, like some of Olsen’s characters and like Tillie Olsen herself—they said the unspeakable to one another, and continued going about their business together, wounded or not. Continue reading →