Documents of Proletarian Fiction: Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties

Tillie Olsen’s unfinished proletarian novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) is a work that the author began drafting during the 1930s but was not “completed” and published until the 1970s. Olsen uses the unique circumstances of Yonnondio’s delayed publication to create a recovery framework around her book. Within this framework, Olsen emphasizes Yonnondio’s unfinished status and anachronistic relationship to 1974, thus transforming her book of fiction into a material document of the earlier decade’s unrealized political project. Olsen’s framework resignifies the book’s incompletion and absent revolutionary ending as a value rather than a failure. Using Yonnondio’s recovery as a framing device to rework key tenets of the 1930s proletarian literary movement, Olsen sets forth a text that offers a different perspective on political transformation.