Tell Me a Riddle.
Inscribed to Nolan Miller
Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me A Riddle. A Collection. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1961.
8vo.; green illustrated wrappers, perfect bound. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition, wrappered issue. A presentation copy, inscribed in the month of publication on the inside of the front wrapper in Olsen’s miniscule holograph: For Nolan Miller—who nurtured—unforgetting, Tillie Olsen November, 1961. Teacher, novlist, and, most importantly, fiction editor of The Antioch Review for fifty years, Nolan Miller published “Hey Sailor, What Ship,” in the anthology New Campus Writing—the first story by Olsen to appear in print. Contemporary presentations of this title are very scarce.
Boxed together with:
Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties. [New York]: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, (1974).
8vo.; blue wrappers.
Boxed together with:
Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio: From the Thirties. [New York]: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, (1974).
8vo.; red cloth; white dust-jacket.
Uncorrected proofs and a first edition of Olsen’s first novel, published fifteen years after Tell Me a Riddle. The proof, with publisher’s review and information slips taped in, is an important presentation copy, inscribed to noted New York bookseller Burt Britton, with a comment on the corruption of the text: Dear Burt-I am sorry you have this-I am sorry I could not prevent this edition with its changes made by an impertinent copy editor, and a publisher who refused to print corrections to original copy, and all the changes and revisions I felt necessary after seeing these proofs. The paperback is right. Tillie. Olsen added emendations to show her specific displeasure: she corrected the publication date on the publisher’s slip, penned an illegible note on the front panel and wrote in “and an unnamed copy editor (also)” to the review slip’s printed “Author: Tillie Olsen.” The first edition is an advance copy with publisher’s review slip loosely inserted; it is also inscribed: For Burt Britton, Book Lover-See note in uncorrected page proof. Thank you for caring for this anyway. Tillie Olsen 1976. Signed by Olsen a second time on the title page.
In a printed note to the first edition, Olsen recounts the long and tortured trip to publication:
This book, conceived primarily as a novel of the 1930’s, was begun in 1932 in Faribault, Minnesota, when the author was nineteen, and worked on intermittently into 1936 or perhaps 1937 . . . Thought long since lost or destroyed, some of its pages were found intermixed with other old papers . . . A later, more thorough, search turned up additional makings: odd tattered pages, lines in yellowed notebooks, scraps . . . There were usually two to fourteen versions to work from: 38 to 41 year old penciled-over scrawls and fragment to decipher and piece together. Judgment had to be exercised as to which version, revision or draft to choose or combine . . . In this sense—the choices and omissions, the combinings and reconstruction—the book ceased to be solely the work of that long ago young writer and, in arduous partnership, became this older one’s as well But it is all the old manuscripts—no rewriting, no new writing.
When Olsen abandoned writing to raise her children and pursue political activism, she had not yet finished the novel. Since she didn’t want to add new material when preparing it for publication, she left it unfinished, only commenting, “Reader, it was not to have ended here.”
Yonnondio (the title comes from a Walt Whitman poem) does not read as a cabled together work. Rather, Olsen’s faithfulness to her early text preserves her honesty and immediacy to the events she chronicles. The novel is the story of a family forced into migration by the Great Depression. Olsen later explained that she focused on the family to show the limiting effect of America’s social system. However, the acclaim won by the book stems less from its
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