DEBORAH SILVERTON ROSENFELT
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 | How much it takes to become a writer. Bent ....
circumstances, time, development of craft-but beyond
that: how much conviction as to the importance of what
one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will,
the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to
comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a
class that breeds such confidence.
Almost impossible for a girl, a woman.
TILLIE OLSEN,
Silences
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Tillie Olsen's life spans more than eighty years of this century. Born in Nebraska in 1912 or 1913, she lives today, as she has for many years, in a third-floor walk-up apartment in cooperative housing in San Francisco, still the modestly priced multicultural community envisioned by its longshoremen's union founders. Writer, scholar, teacher, activist, mother, she has touched the lives of others through her presence as well as through her prose. Her legacy of published work is not large: in the thirties, two poems, two essays, a story; in the forties, columns for the
People's World,
a leftist newspaper; subsequently, the work she is known for
todayTell Me a Riddle
(1962), a volume of short fiction;
Yonnondio,
a novel written in the thirties but not published until 1974; ''Requa I" (1970), a short story, intended as the first section of a longer work;
Silences
(1978), a collection of critical essays as intricately webbed as a poem. A poem and a short story written when Olsen was in her teens were published for the first time in 1993. She also edited a "daybook and reader,"
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother
(1984), a gathering of words from 120 writersmothers and daughters, including herself
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