Silences: Classic Essays on the Art of Creating - Softcover

Olsen, Tillie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038528893X ISBN 13: 9780385288934

Publisher: Delta, 1979

Synopsis

Silences draws on the lives, letters, diaries and testimonies of many writers to examine the needs & work of creation and those circumstances that obstruct and silence it. These circumstances may be sex, economic class, color, time and generation into which one is born.

About this title

About the Author:

Activist and author Tillie Olsen is best known for her prize-winning fiction Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio: From the Thirties. She taught at MIT, Stanford, and Amherst. Olsen is an recipient of an Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Review:

This book is about silences. It is concerned with the relationship of circumstances - including class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is born - to the creation of literature." In the United States, why are there so many more male authors than female authors listed in literary course offerings, reviews, and anthologies? Why, especially, when as far back as 1971, one out of every four or five books published were written by women? Is this more proof, "in this so much more favorable century," that women are innately incapable of artistic literary achievement? With poetic language and painstaking thoroughness, Tillie Olsen articulates the obstacles, difficulties, frustrations, and imperatives faced when non-privileged people - women especially - are driven to write: How do working people get sustained periods of time not devoted to wage labor or corrupted by economic pressures? Where do women writers find sufficient space and encouragement to keep writing? Written over a period of fifteen years in time squeezed between wage work and mothering, Silences continues to serve as a model of inviting and accessible scholarship: "A passion and purpose inform its pages: love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers. It is written to re-dedicate and encourage. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen

About this edition

• Publisher: Delta
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 038528893X
• ISBN 13: 9780385288934
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320