Proof Copy, Inscribed
Silences.
[New York]: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, [1978].
Price: $550.00
About the item
First edition, uncorrected proof. [2], xiv, 289, [1] pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Proof Copy, Inscribed. Buff wrappers printed in brown, spine titled in pencil. Publisher’s promotional notice loosely inserted, publication date marked in ink August rather than November. Near fine. Inscribed by the author on the first page.
Item #338594
Inscribed by the author on the first page: “Uncorrected – / I wish I were. / Best / Tillie Olsen.”
Silences was the major critical work by Tillie Olsen, addressing “the relationship of circumstance; – including class, color, sex, the times, climate into which one is born – to the creation of literature.” The book grew out of a talk delivered at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, in which Olsen distinguished between the natural silences that reflect “that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation” in a writer’s career and those silences arising from oppression and neglect, “the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.” Olsen considers the marginalization and frustration of women writers, and devotes the second half of Silences to the creative struggles of Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, and others.
