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    A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes"
    A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes"
    A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes"
    Ebook48 pages34 minutes

    A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535829762
    A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Tillie Olsen's "O Yes" - Gale

      11

      O Yes

      Tillie Olsen

      1957

      Introduction

      Tillie Olsen's short story O Yes was first published in 1957 as Baptism in the University of Nebraska literary journal, Prairie Schooner. This short story was later titled O Yes and included in Olsen's short-story collection Tell Me a Riddle, published in 1961. The title of the story refers to the responsive chant that the members of a church make to the words they hear in the sermon. O Yes includes characters who appeared in two of Olsen's other short stories, Hey Sailor What Ship and Tell Me a Riddle. Olsen's thoughts about race, public education, and motherhood are revealed in O Yes. O Yes is a story clearly situated in the 1950s and in Olsen's own experiences. She occasionally attended a Baptist church located in a predominately black neighborhood, and she once saw a white visitor faint at the intensity of that church experience. She incorporates these experiences in the first part of O Yes. Olsen also witnessed the separation and exclusion that occurs when children transition into junior high school, when cultural and social pressures magnify differences in race and economics. These experiences are expressed in the second part of O Yes.

      Although O Yes is not as well known or anthologized as frequently as the short stories I Stand Here Ironing and Tell Me a Riddle, both of which were also included in Tell Me a Riddle, it has been reprinted in at least two literary anthologies: the Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States (1995) and Discoveries: Fifty Stories of the Quest (1992).

      Author Biography

      Tybile (nicknamed Tillie) Olsen was born January 14, 1912, in Omaha, Nebraska. Her parents, Samuel and Ira Learner, were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled Russia in 1905 for political reasons. The second oldest of six children, Olsen grew up in Omaha, where her father supported the family as a painter and paperhanger. She attended Omaha Central High School but left school after the eleventh grade without graduating. For the next several years she worked in a series of poor-paying jobs such as hotel maid, waitress, laundry worker, factory worker, and packing plant worker. Olsen's parents were active in the socialist movement, and Olsen grew up heavily influenced by her their activities. She joined the Young Communist League and was jailed in 1930 after attempting to organize meat-packing workers in Kansas City, Kansas. Whether from her work in the packing plants or her time in jail, Olsen contracted pleurisy and incipient tuberculosis. While recovering in Minnesota, she began writing a novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties. She became pregnant shortly after she started writing and gave birth to a daughter, Karla, in 1932.

      Olsen moved to California, where she began working to help organize longshoremen and was again jailed in 1934. While involved in union organizing, Olsen wrote essays for the Nation and the New Republic. In 1934,

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