Word: yonnondio
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Literature fascinated her but she found that the literature of the time bore little relation to her experiences and needs. At 19 Tillie started Yonnondio, a book about a poor family in the 1930's that struggled to survive. The story is not autobiographical yet her portrayal of the family and the neighborhoods in which it lived belie an understanding which could only have been born of experience...
However, at the very beginning of her career she had to leave Yonnondio unfinished and stop writing for almost a generation due to the needs of her children. Tillie's creative spirit lay dorment for many years until it was rekindled by the bombing of Hiroshima. "I wrote I Stand Here Ironing in a certain light.... It was the light of the burning bodies.... I had to record, leave something of my time here on earth...
...Tillie Olsen's work was published until 1962, when she was 49 years old, and when Tell Me A Riddle, a collection of stories, came out. Tell Me A Riddle was a critical, but not a popular, success; it was to be twelve more years before Olsen published Yonnondio: From the Thirties...
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