Product Description
"Tell Me a Riddle" renders an unforgettable portrait of a working-class couple when the gender-determined differences in their experiences of poverty and familial life give rise to bitter conflict after almost four decades of marriage. As she dies of cancer, Eva, the protagonist, recollects a revolutionary past that both critiques and offers hope for the present. Deborah Rosenfelt's introduction and the essays in this volume survey the critical reception of this highly acclaimed story, analyze its biographical and historical contexts, examine the text's language, structure, and spiritual and moral significance, and illuminate Olsen's relationship to the American Midwest, the American left, and the Jewish enlightenment tradition.This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Olsen's life, an authoritative text of "Tell Me a Riddle," relevant essays by Olsen, seven critical essays, and a bibliography.The contributors are Joanne Trautmann Banks, Constance Coiner, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Mara Faulkner, Elaine Neil Orr, Linda Ray Pratt, and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

On the Title Story only
This is a review of the title- story only. It is Tillie Olsen's most famous work.It tells the story of the decline in old- age of a strong , independent woman who has given her life to raising her children, and is deeply connected to her own home. Her husband and her are incompatible, and he wishes to sell the home and move into a retirement facility. She in clinging to the home is clinging to her independence. There is both a Jewish cultural and a socialist political milieu pervading the work. It is written in a kind of clipped, poetic language.
The story was considered revolutionary, a creative breakthrough work in its time.
I found it somewhat difficult at times, but with a harsh and admirable integrity.

Brilliant, sad, and wise
Tillie Olsen packs a lifetime of enforced silences into this slender work of art.These are dense and poetic evocations of Joyce and Woolf, but with an added proletarian knife-thrust to the heart.

Powerful
"Hey Sailor, What Ship" is the most powerful, concentrated portrayal of alcoholism that I have ever read.Olsen gets inside the mind of a late-stage alcoholic.Her prose seems to stretch and distort as her main character goes on an unplanned bender while on shore leave.

She shows beautiful restraint, too: there is nothing sensational or mawkish here.I am in awe of this story.

Will someone translate this for me please?
Tillie Olson is a brilliant woman. She was way ahead of her time, breaking through the constraints binding talented women back then by her sheer persistence and follow-through, becoming recognized as a notable author. Her insights regarding women authors of the 19th century are brilliant. And her story "Tell Me A Riddle" is a classic.

However, her words sometime seem to start from the middle of a conversation, back up against one another, fall over themselves and then make a circuitous route to sometimes puzzling conclusions. "Tell Me A Riddle" occasionally found me shaking my head as if to dislodge some buzzwords that were way too loud and confusing. Although I understood the gist of this powerful story, I found its delivery to be irritating.

Perhaps that is the way Tillie Olsen writes. However, despite the brilliance of her observations, I find her writing style too discordant.

I Sit Here Typing...
Amazed by her words and writing - the first story, I STAND HERE IRONING - where a mother is mulling over the changes in her and her daughter's lives and relationship. The stories were published in the 50s originally, but were written in a time-free fashion. Get you a copy, you hear? ... Read more

Product Description

First published in 1978, Silences single-handedly revolutionized the literary canon. In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent -- the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors' letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen's heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen's now infamous reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction and author preface.

Customer Reviews (2)

How circumstances affect the creation of literature
This scholarly exploration of how silence is imposed on the literary writing of those people hampered by gender, class, religion, or ethnicity was first published in 1978 and has recently been reissues with a new preface. Olsen speaks of the obstacles and frustrations faced when women and other disenfranchised people are driven to put words to paper. The fact that Olsen took 15 years to write this book, squeezing bits of time between working and mothering, goes a long way toward demonstrating exactly what she's talking about.

Why aren't you writing?
Silences by Tillie Olsen

Annotated Bibliography

This book is addressed to the silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, to the dying and death of capacity.It is about the censorship and self-censorship of woman primarily. The book is written to encourage everyone who is marginalized to find a place for their voice amidst the constrictions of wage-labor and child rearing because their experiences are invaluable.Olsen estimates that only one out of twelve writers in our century are women.Olsen goes into great depth telling the story of Rebecca Harding Davis a nineteenth century woman who spoke out through her literature from isolation both as a woman without encouragement and as a citizen of a backward city, without even a library, in what became West Virginia. She wrote and eventually was introduced to society and made great friends with many prominent writers, however, at age thirty-one she married, and once she had children she let her writing go.Her sympathetic perspective about iron-workers in her town is almost inexplicable in terms of her class.Olsen asks how she got the information she used in her story and remarks on her personal qualities that made her into a popular conversationalist before she retreated/succumbed to motherhood and fulfilled the role of what was properly expected of her. Primarily this book is about the silences of women throughout time.It asks why women have not been enabled to publish, why their lives have usually been overwhelmed by child rearing (their work not allowing time for writing), what is wrong with the world that it doesn't ask-and make it possible-for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them.Olsen explores the idea that women must choose between their art and their fulfillment as a woman and asks what difference it makes to literature if a woman remains childless especially since so many marvels have been created by childless woman.There is a wonderful excerpt from Henry James on the value he placed on his mother'ssacrifices to her family.The book is filled with quotes from writers, Katherine Anne Porter writes that writers must not let editors or publishers tamper with their lives because writers are practicing an art while publishers are running a business.Olsen notes that at one time woman were asked to divest themselves of characteristics that might identify them as women if they were to try to write in this man's world.Cynthia Ozick is quoted as saying "...The term "woman writer"...has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically.A woman is a writer."Common people are asked why they do not write and writers are examined to understand why they have pauses in their otherwise fertile production.This is not about those times a writer takes to regenerate and think creatively, but rather, about those times when it is impossible to write because of the pressures the artist puts on him/herself or allows the world to impose. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Photographs by Robert Adams, Harry Callahan, Bruce Davidson, Larry Fink, Danny Lyon, Sally Mann, Eudora Welty, and more
Essays by Tillie Olsen and Estelle Jussim
Prose and poetry by Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Alice Walker,
and Eudora Welty

In this extraordinary volume, Mothers & Daughters: An Exploration in Photographs with essays by Tillie Olsen and Estelle Jussim, the most basic and the most mysterious of relationships -- as experienced in contemporary America -- is explored in all of its variety, nuance, and ambivalence.

Nearly ninety photographers contributed penetrating images of mothers and their daughters -- women of every shape, hue, and social station. The result is an emotional mosaic of depth and detail and also a pioneering accomplishment in the history of photography.

The photographers are joined by leading women writers and poets offering a kaleidoscopic gathering of insights and observations.
... Read more

Product Description
The selections of criticism in this anthology reveal the social, cultural, and economic contexts of the writings of Tillie Olsen. The essays link Olsen with socialism, feminism, and the American literary tradition, and show the potential for activism cultivated in her early years. They reflect her concern with women and children, and explore her belief in the power of the written and spoken word. The volume also serves as a companion to other full-length studies of Olsen. ... Read more

Product Description

First published in 1978, Silences single-handedly revolutionized the literary canon. In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent -- the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors' letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen's heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen's now infamous reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction and author preface.

Customer Reviews (7)

Why aren't you writing?

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Why aren't you writing?, September 18, 2003
By Charity Kendall (Ann Arbor, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
Silences by Tillie Olsen

Annotated Bibliography

This book is addressed to the silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, to the dying and death of capacity. It is about the censorship and self-censorship of woman primarily. The book is written to encourage everyone who is marginalized to find a place for their voice amidst the constrictions of wage-labor and child rearing because their experiences are invaluable. Olsen estimates that only one out of twelve writers in our century are women.Olsen goes into great depth telling the story of Rebecca Harding Davis a nineteenth century woman who spoke out through her literature from isolation both as a woman without encouragement and as a citizen of a backward city, without even a library, in what became West Virginia. She wrote and eventually was introduced to society and made great friends with many prominent writers, however, at age thirty-one she married, and once she had children she let her writing go. Her sympathetic perspective about iron-workers in her town is almost inexplicable in terms of her class. Olsen asks how she got the information she used in her story and remarks on her personal qualities that made her into a popular conversationalist before she retreated/succumbed to motherhood and fulfilled the role of what was properly expected of her. Primarily this book is about the silences of women throughout time. It asks why women have not been enabled to publish, why their lives have usually been overwhelmed by child rearing (their work not allowing time for writing), what is wrong with the world that it doesn't ask-and make it possible-for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them. Olsen explores the idea that women must choose between their art and their fulfillment as a woman and asks what difference it makes to literature if a woman remains childless especially since so many marvels have been created by childless woman. There is a wonderful excerpt from Henry James on the value he placed on his mother's sacrifices to her family.The book is filled with quotes from writers, Katherine Anne Porter writes that writers must not let editors or publishers tamper with their lives because writers are practicing an art while publishers are running a business. Olsen notes that at one time woman were asked to divest themselves of characteristics that might identify them as women if they were to try to write in this man's world. Cynthia Ozick is quoted as saying "...The term "woman writer"...has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A woman is a writer."Common people are asked why they do not write and writers are examined to understand why they have pauses in their otherwise fertile production. This is not about those times a writer takes to regenerate and think creatively, but rather, about those times when it is impossible to write because of the pressures the artist puts on him/herself or allows the world to impose.

Comment | Was this review helpful to you?YesNo (Report this)

a way to get the book
It is an embarassment that this title is out of print. As a woman, mother, writer, I am reading it now + find it to be an important tool. SO here is my suggestion for obtaining a copy, which may be awful but nonetheless itis how I got my copy: I borrowed it from the library and then told them Ilost it + then I paid for it.

These essays have had a profound impact on my own work.
I am not shocked that this wonderful work is out of print -- it's simply history repeating itself. But I do think we should work very hard to get it back into print, probably by one of the small feminist publishers, such asThe Feminist Press or Aunt Lute or Spinster -- because they are faithful totheir books.However, until that happens, those looking for the essayswill find many of them reprinted in various anthologies, including thetitle essay, "Silences: When Writers Don't Write" in IMAGES OFWOMEN IN FICTION: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ed. Susan Koppelman, Popular Press,1972, and still in print and available from the publisher.

I agree with the previously stated
I would like to be able to read this book as well, being that I am a woman, a writer, and going into the Entertainment Industry, as writer, director, and producer...and we all know, the type of field it is! Thisbook was recommended by a fave author of mine, Kate Elliott, and I wouldreally like to read it for myself! I will re-state from the above,"How do we go about getting this back in print?"

Base for International Women Writers Resolution to the UN Wo
It is difficult to understand why this book is out of stock. Olsen's ideas encouraged International PEN Women Writers' Committee(of which I was then Chair) to hold two regional conferences on censorship and self-censorshipof women. It was also part of the inspiration for the resolution forwardedby our delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Womenwriters have been aware for centuries about women's silences, but it wasgenerally acknowledged that there was little support for the perspective ofit being institutionalised ,deliberate ,and encouraged by societies. Thosewho wish to find evidence for the phenomenon and examples of women whobroke the silencewould find much to interest them in'The Book of the Cityof Ladies' by Christina de Pizan, a Fourteenth Century Italian writer(andwidow) at the court of the King of France.Christina broke many of thetaboos of her day. It is remarkable that women's censorship andself-censorship(silences) are not the subject of doctoral theses in women'sstudies' departments. Olsen provided women everywhere with a great servicein writing this book. Read it,I urge you to do so.It will make you reflect,if you are a woman, on your own silences. If you are a man with an openmind, it will probably make you wonder how such a continual human rights'abuse has continued for so long.Perhaps the answer is because it is asilent one.The scars are and have been felt on the souls of ourmothers,sisters, and daughters of blood and spirit throughout the milleniaof recorded human history.Simply because they do not inflict physical hurt,does not mean that such silent scars do not constitute abuse.Olsen'sbook,'Silences',did much to set the record straight. I , as a woman writer,am grieved, at both the intellectual and emotional levels, that such avaluable record should go out of print.It is ironical that in the 'greatage of gender issues'such a book is no longer available. ... Read more

Product Description
In Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles, Panthea Reid examines the complex life of this iconic feminist hero and twentieth-century literary giant.Based on diaries, letters, manuscripts, private documents, resurrected public records, and countless interviews, ReidÂ's sets the record straight correcting fabrications and myths about and also by Tillie Olsen. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Could She Really Have Been This Awful?
Panthea Reid performed extraordinary feats of research and detection to write her life of feminist writer Tillie Olsen, but she could have stopped at the corner store to pick up half a pint of compassion.As it stands, we have a gigantic book in which the ostensible subject gets her hands slapped on every page.In fact I took a sample at random (from the chapter "Queen Bee") and found Olsen trapped in another lie in every paragraph for ten pages, a streak broken only by a paragraph that discussed her love of being admired and idolized.

It is a curious case, but Reid does not make it easy to understand Olsen by any means, and I would think this should be one of the principal aims of biography.How is it that Olsen was able to write so beautifully at different times in her life, but only for short stints?What caused the annus mirabilis during which she wrote most of all of her famous short story collection TELL ME A RIDDLE?You won't find the answers here, but you'll find Olsen exhibiting every bad behavior known to mankind at one time or another--most often, lying, like Truman Capote, about the status of one or another long-awaited work.

Olsen benefitted from the women's liberation movement, but Reid (also a beneficiary) castigates contemporary scholars and critics for over-praising Olsen, because once the praise went to her head she could be outrageously vain.There's one funny story after another about Olsen refusing to surrender the spotlight to another.At a speech by Helen Caldicott at Grace Cathedral, Alice Walker was drafted to introduce Olsen, which she did pithily and well, and Olsen was supposed to introduce Caldicott, but she never did, preferring instead to please her fans by dominating the pulpit and recalling her own memories of the atom bomb and then dragging out her most famous story, "I Stand Here Ironing," until the appalled organizers finally had to drag her away.She wrote "Silences," but she was never herself silent and always squawking about her dignity to prevent others from seeing that the emperor had no clothes.She made a practice of appalling Alice Walker with racist comments and gifts, until Walker stopped speaking to her during a trying women's tour of China.Reid can be droll about all of this, but in effect her method makes the life of Tillie Olsen seem like one long, long episode of MAUDE with Bea Arthur, only with a bad taste in her mouth.Plainly Olsen disgusts her on a micro-level as well as a macro-level, and I wonder if all of Reid's biographies are this one-sided and contemptuous.

But I give the book four stars for its research, as well as its focus and its incredible wealth of Olsen stories.(Though I wonder what happened to Jessica Mitford, who isn't even a name in the index.Wasn't she supposed to be a friend of Olsen's?A Reid kind of friend, a friend who told everyone that Tillie Olsen had never ironed in her life.)Speaking of which, I didn't know until this book that Olsen's fans all over the world made a practice of sending her miniature irons in homage to her writing.And oh, how Olsen loved those "tiny irons" and how she loved that applause! ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

A novella of poverty
A young girl survives a very hardscrabble existance, dragged from coal mine to sunflower farm to the bloody slaughterhouses of Omaha as her father struggles to find work that will support himself and his growing family. The little girl tries to find joy in a life that is almost totally devoid of it; to escape despair, her father drinks; her mother, constantly pregnant, is worn out trying to keep them all fed and housed; and the one place where they are all happy, the sunflower farm in North Dakota, ruins them with capricious weather. Their final move, to Omaha, is where the book ends.

I gave the book 5 stars on the strength of the writing and story; a book that was begun decades earlier, the author resurrected what was already written and published it without adding much. It's a pity there is no followup; it is a story begging for resolution. You wonder how the family did; if the children grew to escape the fates of their parents (one child is lost to sickness), or if they were lost in the cracks of humanity that swarmed amongst the poor of the 30s. I heard stories like this while growing up, from survivors of the Depression; we will probably not return to such abject misery as is portrayed here, but this thin little book is a cautionary tale, and very moving.

An unfinished and lovely work
The majority of Yonnondio was written when Olsen was 19 years old. Her husband discovered its remains among Olsen's papers in 1972 and she herself pieced the current book together and published the still unfinished results in 1974. This newest version of the book includes new material discovered by Olsen that was not included in the 1974 version.

Yonnondio (the title taken from a Walt Whitman poem) is a moving lament for the impoverishment and despair of young families and young women during the depression. Despite the uneveness and jumpiness of the narrative (an artifact of its unfinished status), the small and detailed moments leap out through the pages to capture the reader. It is occasionally a very sad book, and always very beautiful.

It's unusual to be so impressed by an unfinished novel published when the author was still living. Unfortunately, Olsen has published so few works that even something rough and unfinished is a welcome treat. While I understand her insistence that she would not write any new material for the book, it is hard not to read it and wish it were possible to read the finished book. If the fragments are so magnificent, what would the final work have been? ... Read more

Product Description
Better Red is an interdisciplinary study addressing the complicated intersection of American feminism and the political left as refracted in Tillie Olsen's and Meridel Le Sueur's lives and literary texts. The first book-length study to explore these feminist writers' ties to the American Communist Party, it contributes to a reenvisioning of 1930s U.S. Communism as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis. At once loyal members of the male-dominated Communist party and emerging feminists, Olsen and Le Sueur exhibit in their writing tendencies both toward and away from Party tenets and attitudes--at points subverting formalist as well as orthodox Marxist literary categories. By producing working-class discourse, Olsen and Le Sueur challenge the bourgeois assumptions--often masked as classless and universal--of much canonical literature; and by creating working-class women's writing, they problematize the patriarchal nature of the Left and the masculinist assumptions of much proletarian literature, anticipating the concerns of "second wave" feminists a generation later. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This is a spectacularly important book.
This is an extremely important and readable book about two very important working-class writers.It is one of the finest efforts of its kind to begin to help us rediscover and recover working-class literature as well asto renew the importance of class in our national discussion. ... Read more

Product Description
This work examines Tillie Olsen's four short stories in" Tell Me A Riddle", and her novel fragment "Yonnondio: From the Thirties" in terms of the ethical development of the adolescent female characters. The study uses the ethics of responsibility and care as identified by Carol Gilligan to investigate each young female character's struggle to grow, to make her place in the world, and to remain in relationship with herself and others. The book contextualizes the exclusion of the ethics of care from the literary canon and argues for inclusion of multiple ethical modes. ... Read more

Product Description
Combining biography, history, and literary theory, this work looks at three of the most significant women writers to emerge from American radicalism of the 1930s. Le Sueur, Olsen, and Herbst were influenced by the Communist movement of the time, but each also forged an independent vision offeminist socialist literary milieu. Drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and addressing the challenge of such new feminist theorists as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roberts takes a theoretical approach that encompasses the social vision and feminist practice of the writers and places them in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. The study covers their lives from the turn of the century to the 1970s, with an emphasis on the 1930s; examines their views of the Cold War; links the three to the Progressive tradition; and analyzes their key literary works.Resources for analysis include historical and contemporary theory; excerpts from the radical press of the 1920s and 1930s; and primary materials from the writers themselves, including journals, notes, and unpublished archival materials. ... Read more

Product Description

Tillie Olsen's fiction and nonfiction portray, with all their harsh contours, the lives of people who cannot speak for themselves or whose words have been forgotten or ignored. Olsen's writing is neither serene nor despairing. In this sensitive thematic reading, Mara Faulkner shows that its most subversive function is the assertion that human life can be other than and more than it is. Olsen's promise of full creative life aims to make her readers forever dissatisfied with physical, emotional, and intellectual starvation.

In this comprehensive examination of a literature of social consciousness, Faulkner approaches Olsen's work within their historical, social, and political contexts without treating them as propaganda. In fact, she shows that it is Olsen's compressed, poetic style that gives her writing its revolutionary power.

Product Description

Customer Reviews (2)

thanks
Thank you so much!!
the item that i ordered has come in a really nice condition
that i expected.
thanks again.

vivid tale of 1860's Welsh ironworkers in WVA mills
I read Life in the Iron Mills for a graduate English course on social-class-imagery in 18th & 19th cen Transatlantic (British and American) literature with Elisabeth Ceppi at Portland State.Ceppi asked us to read closely for the rhetoric of class attributes.There was much class-identifying-imagery to observe in Harding-Davis' 1860's rendering of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners transported into late-slave-era iron foundries of the American North. Mid-19th-cen feminist literature of this social-reform type is deeply informed by Protestant missionary enthusiasm to transform everyone into clean-living bourgeois church-goers. Thus Harding-Davis uses powerful polarities of dirt for workers, clean for bouregoisie, etc. It's so blunt and obvious that she could be accused of writing soap-opera ... as many of her mid-1800's female-writer colleagues were accused, sometimes justly.However her scenes of poverty, disease, and death in the mills are so heart-wrenching that her motives are clearly pure. Now that Tillie Olsen has rescued Harding-Davis' wonderful writing from obscurity, she is good to read for knowledge of American feminist writing history, for understanding of American class polarities in the ante-bellum era, and also for a true, scary story of life with the great unwashed. ... Read more

Product Description
Pillars of American literature, these two newly repackaged titles have been loved and admired by readers for decades.  Set during the Depression, Yonnondio : From The Thirties is the timeless and hauntingly timely story of the Holbrook family, struggling for a more tolerable existence.  Written by the author in the 1930s and rediscovered by her in the 1970s, Yonnondio will always be an unfinished work that makes us long for more of that young author's brilliance.  This reissue presents newly discovered fragments and scenes that satisfy some of that longing and give a more complete picture of the fate of the mother, Anna, one of literature's most believable and enduring woman. Tell Me A Riddle is a collection of four stories: "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?," "O Yes," and the title novella, which won the O. Henry Award in 1961.  Anthologized over a hundred times, the stories live on in the hearts of readers everywhere.  John Leonard provides a new introduction that is a personal reminiscence as well as reaffirmation of Olsen's place in American literature's pantheon of great writers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

This book needs to remain in print!
First, the woman who claims the father in this book has sexual relations with his child is mistaken.Actually, what takes place is a marital rape that the child hears through the wall.Not pretty, but any feminist activist has to know this kind of tragedy didn't end in the 30s...

That aside, this book is one of the most poignant portrayals of poverty and working class struggle I've ever read.I've taught it to literature students who agreed that the picture Yonnondio paints is not pretty, but the book is mesmerizing just the same.It's absolutely shameful that an amazing book by one of the foremost advocates for women's and working class people's rights is being "silenced" by going out of print.

Excellent
Tillie Olsen write much like Steinbeck in her prose as she illustrates the struggles of a poor family.

Child and wife abuse hidden from book description
As an activist for 30 years, I initially was drawn to the description of the book, primarily that which dealt with working class and women's struggles. However, as I read the first quarter of the book, it became difficult to read the pages of abuse (hitting, beating) to the children and wife in this story. I was determined to read the rest, based on the seemingly progressive content/review of the book. I stopped in the middle of the book when the father/husband had sexual relations with his (female) child. I have never thrown out a book before, but with this one, I did so with pleasure.

Olsen Gives What Matters
Tillie Olsen's YONNONDIO is such an essential story of poverty and personal struggle. When we look around for stories that help us, this should be high on any list. It's as relevant today as it was in 1936; the poor continue to be used and forgotten, and yet their spirit rises as it does in this clear and compassionate portrait. ... Read more