Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur

Blending criticism, biography and oral history, this dense feminist study draws striking parallels between two working-class women writers--Tillie Olsen (born 1912?), whose fiction (Tell Me A Riddle; Yonnondio) has won acclaim, and Meridel Le Sueur (born 1900), novelist (The Girl), reporter and short-story writer who became a cultural icon among feminists in the 1970s. Both were loyal members of the U.S. Communist Party, and both, as emerging feminists, rebelled against the party's entrenched sexism. Coiner, who interviewed Olsen and Le Sueur extensively, observes that both writers made emotional deformities, family relations and the developing consciousness of children central to their writing. By confronting experiences that shape women's lives--pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, battery, rape, sexism, isolation--both writers fulfilled the maxim ``the personal is the political,'' while challenging the acquisitive individualism and patriarchy that they saw as warping features of capitalist society. Conceived as a dissertation, this book will be of most interest to informed readers. (Mar.)