Guide to the Sondra Spatt Olsen Papers, 1940-2013

Collection Summary

Biographical Note

Sondra Spatt Olsen (1936-2013) was born in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA from Vassar College in 1957, and MA from Radcliffe College in 1958. She went on to teach at Brooklyn College from 1958-1961, and Queens College from 1958-1985. Olsen’s first collection of fiction, Traps (1991) won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Later in her career (2004), she published Lauren’s Line, a satirical novel about the life of a university English department professor on an urban campus.

Works by Sondra Spatt Olsen have appeared in The New Yorker, Redbook, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Ontario Review, Yale Review, Carolina Quarterly. In 1984 she was named a B. Dalton Fellow, and in 1985 she was named a winner in a PEN Syndicated Fiction Competition.

Olsen lived in New York City with her husband and two children, where she worked and wrote, drawing much of her subject matter from the Manhattan life that surrounded her.

Scope and Content Note

The majority of the collection contains manuscripts and typescripts, many in draft form, with notations by the author, as well as commentary by colleagues, friends, and editors. Collected writings include essays from grade school, through the author’s college years at Vassar, as well as published and unpublished works spanning her career as a writer for over five decades. Writings from the mid 1950s provide insight into life on Vassar’s campus and includes the author’s reflections on her own identity while attending a women’s college at that time. Drafts of an unrealized epistolary novel include extensive correspondence from young friends of the author, which Olsen collected as potential subject matter. Manuscripts written later in her career frequently include correspondence from publishers and editors, with commentary on works in draft form.

The majority of the collection contains manuscripts and typescripts, many in draft form, with notations by the author, as well as commentary by colleagues, friends, and editors. Collected writings include essays from grade school, through the author’s college years at Vassar, as well as published and unpublished works spanning her career as a writer for over five decades. Writings from the mid 1950s provide insight into life on Vassar’s campus and includes the author’s reflections on her own identity while attending a women’s college at that time. Drafts of an unrealized epistolary novel include extensive correspondence from young friends of the author, which Olsen collected as potential subject matter. Manuscripts written later in her career frequently include correspondence from publishers and editors, with commentary on works in draft form.

Journals and notebooks document Olsen’s writing from a young age (elementary school). Journals from later years (1986-1989) document the author’s insights into the writing life following her teaching career, and include several character sketches, plot outlines, and general observations collected for possible subject matter.

Personal and professional files includes correspondence with publishers, editors, and peers. These files also contain documentation of the author’s management of her writing career, including hand written logs documenting the submission of manuscripts for potential publication. Eight folders (1956-2012) contain acceptance and rejection letters from a variety of publications, as assembled by the author.

Correspondence includes letters from her undergraduate years at Vassar (1953-1957), graduate studies at Radcliffe College (1957-1958), and teaching career both at Brooklyn College (1959-1961), and later, at Queens College (1959-1985). One folder (1956-1965) contains correspondence between Olsen and fellow writer, Joan Jaffe Hall, who co-founded the women’s study program at the University of Connecticut.

Correspondence also includes letters from editorial staff from: Mademoiselle, The Nation, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., Redbook, The New Yorker, Seventeen, Ontario Review (Joyce Carol Oates), Houghton Mifflin Co., Charles Scribner’s Sons, publisher, Nat Sobel, author Nancy Means Wright, Mademoiselle editor, Cyrilly Abels, and members of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.

Notebooks and journals in the collection contain both school work and study notes from Vassar, and in later years (1990s) include editorial commentary from peers with whom she collaborated at various writing workshops.

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Encoded by Laura Streett, May 2018.

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