Biography
Tillie Olsen, then known as Tillie Lerner and later famous as the author of Tell Me a Riddle, was a young Communist writer arrested as a 'vagrant' in a San Francisco apartment during the anti-red police drive that accompanied the July 1934 West Coast maritime and general strike. Active in the Young Communist League and the Warehouse Union, she was jailed in the roundup of radicals.
Note: Her birth year is disputed — some authoritative sources give January 14, 1913; this record uses 1912.
