Ed Vulliamy
Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb edited by Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb and six other books by Sanora Babb
In the summer of 1938 Sanora Babb, an aspiring, talented, and determined young writer, joined the volunteer staff at camps in California’s Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys run by the Farm Services Administration, which housed thousands of destitute farmers displaced by the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Babb had a singular empathy for the “Okies,” since she had been raised in dire poverty in Oklahoma and Colorado. She wrote formal reports and kept personal notes on the tribulations of her charges: their hunger, resilience, search for work, and attempts at family life. Babb passed some of these papers to her boss, the FSA administrator Tom Collins; he shared them with a visitor to the camps, John Steinbeck, who had just become famous for his book Of Mice and Men (1937). Babb also fused her notes with her own life story in the first chapters of a novel, which she dispatched, unsolicited, to Random House in New York.
Bennett Cerf, cofounder of Random House, was so enthusiastic about the manuscript that he paid Babb’s fare to fly east and arranged a hotel room in Manhattan where she finished the novel, entitled Whose Names Are Unknown after the wording of eviction notices: “To John and Jane Doe, whose True Names are Unknown.” Cerf wrote to Babb on July 27, 1939, that “our first reader’s report on your book is exceptionally fine.” Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—also about those in flight from Dust Bowl storms, seeking work and shelter in California—had been published that April and had received the acclaim it deserved. That first reader told Cerf, “The GRAPES was first, and many will follow. This will be one of the best.” But a second reader was wary of Steinbeck’s impact: “Under the circumstances...we will invite hypercritical attention—to its disadvantages.” Cerf wrote to Babb on August 16:
What rotten luck for you that “The Grapes of Wrath” should not only have come out before your book was submitted, but should have so swept the country! Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax.
Bitterly disappointed, Babb stashed her book in a drawer at her home in Los Angeles, where it remained unpublished until May 2004, by which time she was bedridden and had only nineteen months to live. Whose Names Are Unknown was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for 2005. “A better read for today’s market than The Grapes of Wrath,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “leaner, faster paced and full of details that give a more insightful look at a tragic time in American history.” “The publication of Whose Names Are Unknown rights a decadesold literary wrong,” according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
Yet Babb’s remarkable writing remains in America’s literary shadows, perhaps because she began her career in Steinbeck’s shadow. The first collection of critical writing on her work, Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora
Babb, coedited by Joanne Dearcopp, her agent and friend for decades, has just been published. The essays in it appraise Babb’s contribution to American literature, especially to western and “regionalist” writing. There are also two new and expanded editions of Babb’s short stories and one of her poetry. These books demonstrate the continuing relevance of Babb’s themes of ecology, feminism, migration, and racial injustice. At the same time, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist William Kennedy writes in his foreword to a new edition of her memoir, An Owl on Every Post (1970), “It was her pursuit of the poetic that generated the lyricism that distinguishes all Sanora’s writing, and that led her to discover the mystery and the magic in the ordinary, in the hardscrabble life.” And no wonder: Babb was writing in significant part from the experience of her own exceptional life.
Sanora
Babb was born in 1907 in Red Rock, Oklahoma Territory, the eldest of two sisters. Her father, Walter, was of Irish and Welsh stock, variously a baker, farmer, and professional gambler; her mother Jennie’s family was refined, originally from Virginia, and she had married Walter when she was fifteen. The family had close ties with the local Otoe tribe: Walter founded and coached a Native baseball team, and as a child Sanora stayed at Otoe summer and winter camps, where Chief Old Eagle honored her with a wild pony and baptized her Little Cheyenne Riding
Like the Wind after she first rode it. When Sanora was seven, Walter was persuaded by his father, Alonzo, to bring the family to join him on the high plains of southeastern Colorado, where they all lived in a one-room earthen dugout and tried to grow broomcorn on unsuitable land. These were formative years for Babb; she sometimes went a week without food and was at the mercy of—and in wonder at—the boundless land, immeasurable sky, and wrath of the weather.
The family next moved to Elkhart, Kansas, where Sanora attended grade school and, as she wrote later, “noticed with interest that a woman and her sons edited and published the weekly newspaper.” A woman also edited the Forgan Enterprise at the family’s next stop, Forgan, Oklahoma, where Sanora “asked the publisher for a job. But being only twelve . . . I qualified only for ‘printers devil,’” or apprentice. After she graduated as valedictorian of Forgan High School, her family moved again, back to Kansas. Babb studied at a junior college and started as a cub reporter at the Garden City Telegram, where she earned her Associated Press credentials. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to launch a career in journalism, but her arrival coincided with the Great Depression, and little work was forthcoming. She wrote poems and short stories, however, that were published in the many literary “little magazines” and left-wing publications such as The Anvil, The California Quarterly, New Masses, and The Clipper.
In 1936 Babb traveled with a leftist group organized by New Theatre magazine to see a drama festival in Moscow and Leningrad; she also visited collective farms and was impressed by what she saw, especially regarding the status of women, although this was the year of Joseph Stalin’s appalling show trials, about which she apparently wrote nothing. She also spent time in Paris and London. Upon her return, an organizer for the Communist Party USA in Los Angeles urged her to join, which she did. Then came Babb’s time with the Farm Services Administration, established by FDR to help the rural poor. Babb’s field notes and reportage—published posthumously as On the Dirty Plate Trail—are at once empathetic and boldly factual:
It is not then a surprising thing to look into a trailer, cabin, or tent and find a whole family lying on the crowded beds, unable to get up from hunger. They are very quiet. The baby cried for the first day and then became still. Hungry mothers have no milk. The others had lain down first because they were too dizzy to walk about, and when they thought of getting up again, their bodies refused, and their minds had sunk away into a dazed half-world.
Babb resisted racial segregation. One camp note reads, “Be sure to put in novel about Negro committee with woman chairman—and conversation.” No such scene appears in Whose Names Are Unknown, but—unlike Steinbeck’s characters, who are all white—it