Ollie Miss is a folk novel of Southern backwoods and rural, poor black life in Alabama's recent past. The novel serves as an important social record of a past society, time, and circumstance that would evolve into an era of social change, namely the civil rights movement. Ollie Miss is also a love story that speaks of personal loneliness and the need for fulfillment in a young black woman, poor and ignorant, and unattached. It is a story of Ollie Miss's personal struggle to "become" a person in her own right, to be independent, and to find some small measure of happiness in life.

George Wylie Henderson (1904-65) was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. After obtaining training as a typesetter and printer at Tuskegee Institute, he moved to New York. He worked as a Linotype operator for one of the daily newspapers and became a literary participant in the Harlem Renaissance. Henderson wrote for the New York Daily News starting in the 1930s, and he published two novels, Ollie Miss (1935) and Jule (1946).

“Ollie Miss is a woman of such extraordinary sensuality that men are literally made ill, paralyzed, by her presence. [She] appears from nowhere in the small, all-black community in Macon County, Alabama, which is the setting for this novel. She is utterly alone and completely self-sufficient. A satisfying novel.” —Southern Quarterly

“Ollie Miss is a character you don’t forget... this book is a part of American as well as Black American literature.” —Academic Library Book Review