索诺拉·巴布

Sanora Louise Babb (April 21, 1907 – December 31, 2005) was an American novelist, poet, and literary editor known for her realistic portrayal of life during the Great Depression era. Eight of her books, including novels, a memoir, short story collections, and a volume of poetry, were published. After her death, she was featured in the Ken Burns 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl.

Her best known work, Whose Names Are Unknown (2004), received much critical acclaim and was a finalist for the 2005 Spur Award for the Best Western Novel and the 2005 PEN Center USA Literary Award for fiction. The novel had been written decades prior; John Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath had been based on Babb's field notes from interviews of migrant camp families compiled for her own book. Her boss, camp manager Tom Collins, had asked her to provide a copy of her notes to Steinbeck, who dedicated his novel to his wife and to Collins, "who lived it," with no attribution to Babb, whose own work was submitted to her publisher shortly thereafter.

Her short stories and poems have also won recognition. Her short stories "Wildflower" and "Santa Ana" were included in The Best American Short Stories (1950 and 1960 editions) edited by Martha Foley. Her poetry collection, Told in the Seed, won the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 and her poem "Captive" from the Mitre Press Anthology, London won the Gold Medal Award in 1932. Babb's writing focuses on the themes of marginalized people and their connection to nature during the Great Depression. Her other works include The Lost Traveler (1958), An Owl on Every Post (1970), The Dark Earth and Other Stories (1987), Cry of Tinamou (1997), Told in the Seed (1998), On the Dirty Plate Trail (2007), and The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression (2021).

Early life

Sanora Louise Babb was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, the elder daughter of Walter L. and Anna Jeanette "Jennie" (née Parks; later Kempner) Babb, while her father was living in what is now Red Rock, Oklahoma. While neither of her parents belonged to the Otoe tribe, living in a Native American community gave Babb a heightened sensitivity to the relationship between the land and its people. Her father was a professional gambler who moved his family frequently. After betting on a future in dry-land farming, Walter moved his wife, Sanora, and her younger sister Dorothy to a one-room dugout on a broomcorn farm settled by her grandfather, Alonzo Babb, near Lamar, Colorado.

Babb wrote about her experiences from this time period in her life in her The Lost Traveler (1958), an autobiographical novel that depicts a rambling gambling father from his daughter's perspective as she comes of age in the Great Depression and in An Owl on Every Post (1970), a memoir that tells Babb's story of homesteading in the Great Plains from the time she was seven years old. The town in An Owl on Every Post is Two Buttes, in Baca County, to the south of Lamar which is in Prowers County.

After four unsuccessful years in farming, her father moved the family to Elkhart, Kansas and then to Forgan, Oklahoma in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Babb began attending school at eleven. She graduated from high school as the Valedictorian. Afterwards, her father moved the family again to Kansas. She began studying at the University of Kansas but after one year, her lack of financial resources forced her to transfer to a junior college in Garden City, Kansas.

Career

Babb's volunteer work brought her alongside migrant farming communities. This volunteer work with the Farm Security Administration would greatly influence her novel Whose Names Are Unknown.

Babb began working as a printer's assistant at 12 years old. Following this, she worked as a schoolteacher for a short time, before beginning her journalism career at the Garden City Herald, where several of her articles were redistributed by the Associated Press. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to work for the Los Angeles Times, but the newspaper retracted its initial offer following the U.S. stock market crash of 1929. Babb was occasionally homeless during the Depression, sleeping at times in Lafayette Park. She eventually found secretarial work with Warner Brothers and wrote scripts for radio station KFWB. Babb joined the John Reed Club and was a member of the U.S. Communist Party for eleven years. She visited the Soviet Union in 1936.

In 1938, Babb returned to California to work for the Farm Security Administration, a position that would deeply influence the composition of her novel Whose Names Are Unknown. While with the FSA, she kept detailed notes on her experiences in the tent camps with the Dust Bowl migrants. Babb's supervisor, Tom Collins, shared the notes with John Steinbeck, who had recently published several articles on migrants for the San Francisco News. Babb turned the stories she collected into Whose Names Are Unknown and sent the first few chapters to Random House. Editor Bennett Cerf gave Babb an advance for her novel asking her to finish it. Unfortunately, with the publication of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Cerf voided Babb's contract in 1939 for fears that there would not be enough public support for two similar novels. Babb's novel Whose Names Are Unknown was not published until 2004.

In the early 1940s, Babb was the West Coast secretary of the League of American Writers. She edited the literary magazine The Clipper and its successor The California Quarterly, helping to introduce the work of Ray Bradbury and B. Traven. At the same time, she ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles called Ching How, owned by her future husband James Wong Howe.

During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings investigating Hollywood for communist influence which began in 1947, Babb was blacklisted and moved to Mexico City to protect Howe, who was "graylisted", from further harassment.