Indeed, her attention to human perseverance and resiliency, rather than her Midwestern roots or long-standing residency in California, situates Olsen as a Western writer.
The second of six children, Tillie Lerner Olsen was born to Jewish immigrants on 14 January in either 1912 or 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska. (No birth certificate exists, so the exact year of birth is unknown.) Olsen's childhood provided fertile ground for her literary endeavors. The commitment of her working-class parents to social and political activism in their newly racially integrated neighborhood provided a global context for their economic struggles. Her parents, Samuel Lerner and Ida Berber Lerner, had fled Russia after participating in the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution. They settled in Omaha, where Samuel, in addition to working as a tenant farmer, packinghouse worker, painter, paperhanger, and candy maker, became the state secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party.
Olsen's own political activism emerged in her teens when she joined the Young People's Socialist League and, in 1931, the Young Communist League. Depression-era difficulties forced Olsen to leave Omaha Central High School in 1929 after the eleventh grade in order to help support herself and her family. She labored at a variety of jobs, including one position in a tie factory where she contracted pleurisy.
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