Impact of the Great Depression on the Characters in Tillie Olsen’s novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties The Great Depression of the 1930’s, which has been called the “invisible scar, the absent presence,†continues to impact American culture (Rabinowitz 17). The devastating effect of failed businesses, the dust bowl, farm foreclosures, and an unemployment rate of 30 percent reminds us that capitalism is fallible. Although we recall with humility this bleak period of our history, we seldom reflect on the plight of the Depression’s most vulnerable victims--the underpaid, uneducated working poor. In Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Tillie Olsen gives readers a searing personal account of a family struggling to escape, or at least manage, abject poverty. Their journey from a Wyoming mining town to a farm in South Dakota to a slaughterhouse in Omaha presents one disaster after another for the Holbrook family. Because of this cycle, they represent thousands of unsung heroes who struggled to survive and maintain a family unit during difficult times.
