SOURCE: "The Struggle for 'Selfness' through Speech in Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2, Autumn, 1988, pp. 131-39.

In the following essay, Staub traces Olsen's focus on self-articulation and the freedom it brings.

Tillie Olsen's only novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, written between 1932 and 1937 but not published until 1974, concerns a migrant family's impossible dream: the search for happiness and security in a world they never made. It is an often shocking book, one that makes vivid the brutal consequences of homelessness and poverty on a married couple, Jim and Anna Holbrook, and their five children: Mazie, Will, Ben, Jimmie, and baby Bess. As it proceeds, however, it is apparent that the novel belongs primarily to Anna and to Mazie, her oldest daughter, and their efforts to speak and be heard in a hostile environment. From its opening sentence ("The whistles always woke Mazie...