Nebraska Authors

Born (either 1912 or 1914) and raised as a small child in the rural farming community near Mead, NE, Tillie Olsen’s family moved to Omaha in 1918. Her parents were both immigrants from the Russian Jewish community, and were active in the Socialist Party and especially the Workmen’s Circles, a national Jewish Socialist movement which was strong in Omaha in the 1920s. The family’s home life included regular political activities and labor organizing. In her twenties, Tillie rebelled against her parents’ views by joining the Young Communist League in 1931, a move that carried her to Kansas City and St. Joseph, MO, where she assisted in organizing labor strikes. By the mid-1930s, Tillie had moved to Minnesota, where she started writing Yonnondio: From the Thirties, and eventually to California.

In California, Tillie met and married Jack Olsen, a fellow radical, with whom she had four children. Although the demands of motherhood prevented Tillie from continuing with her writing, she remained active in labor organizing. She finally returned to her novel in the 1950s, after her husband found the manuscript for Yonnondio and encouraged her to resume writing. As she gained fame, she used her notoriety to shine a light on the issues of women writers, and to try to resurrect long-lost works by other women writers. Much of her additional printed work has dealt with the plight of women writers, and with the often-loving, often-divisive relationships between mothers and daughters.
Olsen's fiction has been translated into 13 languages; 'Tell Me A Riddle' Olsen's short story, won the 1961 O'Henry award for best short story, and its film adaptation won an Academy Award in 1981, for Best Actor; Her papers are housed at Standford University and New York Public Library.

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Omaha native and UNL journalism graduate, Magnuson covered the Whiteclay unrest and controversy for the Christian Science Monitor. His 2008 book The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns was the Nebraska Center for the Book's 2009 non-fiction book of the year, and received recognition from the Center for Great Plains Studies and ForeWord magazine. Magnuson is Managing Editor for National Defense magazine. He has his own website.

At the end of his book, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, Magnuson acknowledges the "self-taught historians" who "inspired me every step of the way." He lists these as Mari Sandoz, George Hyde, Amos Bad Heart Bull, and Will Spindler.

See also, for Native American subjects: Joe Starita, David Wishart, John R. Wunder and Alan Boye.

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Wallace joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska in 1901 and became Professor of English Dramatic Literature in 1912. A prodigious researcher, in his time he became a very famous Shakespeare scholar, with his discoveries of new Shakespeare documents reported in the European newspapers and the New York Times. In the summers 1904-1909 and then year-round on leave in London from 1909-1916, he and his wife, Hulda Berggren of Wahoo, Nebraska, sifted through over five million Elizabethan legal and administrative documents, finding early court cases involving Shakespeare and discovering new sources on Shakespeare and the theater, including evidence of Shakespeare's financial interest in the Globe Theater. He was also famed for his work on Elizabethan child actors.

His contemporaries in the University of Nebraska English Department included Louise Pound, Prosser Hall Frye, and Lucius Adelno Sherman.

See:
J W Robinson, “Shakespeare and Nebraska: Charles William Wallace, 1865-1932, and the ‘Great Index of the World,’” Nebraska History 60 (1979): 1-20. Accessed on-line via the Nebraska State Historical Society.

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