Ollie Miss (Library of Alabama Classics) - Softcover

Henderson, George Wylie; Jackson, Blyden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081730388X ISBN 13: 9780817303884

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2007

Synopsis

Ollie Miss is a folk novel of Southern backwoods and rural, poor black life in Alabama's recent past. The novel serves as an important social record of a past society, time, and circumstance that would evolve into an era of social change, namely the civil rights movement. Ollie Miss is also a love story that speaks of personal loneliness and the need for fulfillment in a young black woman, poor and ignorant, and unattached. It is a story of Ollie Miss's personal struggle to "become" a person in her own right, to be independent, and to find some small measure of happiness in life.

About this title

About the Author:

George Wylie Henderson (1904-65) was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. After obtaining training as a typesetter and printer at Tuskegee Institute, he moved to New York. He worked as a Linotype operator for one of the daily newspapers and became a literary participant in the Harlem Renaissance. Henderson wrote for the New York Daily News starting in the 1930s, and he published two novels, Ollie Miss (1935) and Jule (1946).

Review:

“Ollie Miss is a woman of such extraordinary sensuality that men are literally made ill, paralyzed, by her presence. [She] appears from nowhere in the small, all-black community in Macon County, Alabama, which is the setting for this novel. She is utterly alone and completely self-sufficient. A satisfying novel.” —Southern Quarterly

“Ollie Miss is a character you don’t forget... this book is a part of American as well as Black American literature.” —Academic Library Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 081730388X
• ISBN 13: 9780817303884
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 298