Today's Discussion Leader: Monica
If there is one piece of work that is read in terms of Olsen's work, it's this story! I think I read somewhere that this story is the one short story most anthologized in all student textbooks. So, it's possible that you might encounter this story in another class!
First, here is the Wikipedia entry for the story: Click here! (remember, that there are spoilers in this entry so don't read until you have read the story!)
I was sort of shocked, but there are even online Spark Notes for this story: Click here!
Here is another great link with resources that contextualize the story:
click here!
A few interesting tibits about her life (and why I personally think she is pretty cool): An activist most of her life, Olsen was jailed twice: "First in Kansas City, winter '32." She was distributing leaflets to the meatpackers. The charge was "making loud and unusual noises." There she "languished five or six weeks--no money for bail--and got pleurisy, then incipient TB," she writes in her essay "The '30s: A Vision of Fear and Hope" (Newsweek, 1994).
Her second arrest occurred just after the San Francisco General Strike in 1934. In response to the murders of several striking longshoremen, 100,000 marched down Market Street to protest. "No one spoke," wrote Olsen. "The only sound was the beat of our feet. Then came 'The Terror'--bloody crackdowns by vigilantes who, the police giving them the power to arrest, wrecked encampments and beat strikers and 'sympathizers.'"
At the time of the General Strike, Olsen was a single mother. She met Jack Olsen (a fellow Young Communist League member) that year and had three more children with him, marrying him in 1944 before he went off to war. They lived together until 1989, when he died.
Awesome writer!
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