SOURCE: "Extending the Boundaries of the Ego: Eva in 'Tell Me a Riddle.'" in Midwestern Miscellany X, edited by Marilyn J. Atlas, Midwestern Press, 1982, pp. 38-48.

In the following essay, Culver discusses Olsen's views on self-fulfillment and motherhood.

And if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

Fruit from a blighted tree will always be sparse. Tillie Olsen's collected works weigh lightly in one hand, yet they weigh more heavily in the mind than many more luxuriant volumes.

Her fiction, a rich trove from a gift "nursed through the night," cherished and preserved against the forces that could have killed it—motherhood in straitened circumstances—retains some of the bleakness where it had to endure. It is remarkably condensed. In "Tell Me A Riddle" she sketches an entire life in fifty-three...