Tillie Olsen's fiction and non-fiction works 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 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...