Sanora Babb

Based upon the author's firsthand experience while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration camps of California. Born in 1907 in an Otoe Indian community in the Oklahoma Territory, Babb joined the FSA camp in California in 1938 to help uprooted farmers. She submitted the manuscript for this book in 1939, but it was shelved because of John Steinbeck's 1939 best-selling novel, The grapes of wrath.

A Novel

Whose Names are Unknown

An Owl on Every Post

Her strong empathy with people and their daily lives and her ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary is reflected in her poems as well as her other writings, but her poetry also quickens to her lyricism, clarity and sense of immediacy.

Poems

Told in the Seed

A collection of short stories and journalism by Sanora Babb, written between 1932 and 1949, that brings to life the painful period of the Great Depression. Arranged chronologically, from early autobiographical short fiction to her leftist journalism and later more innovative fiction, Babb's work interweaves fiction and non-fiction into her characteristic storytelling, lyrical style.Offering unique insights, Babb writes with a passion and empathy gained through personal experience. From her work with the Farm Security Administration and as a labor organizer, Babb was eyewitness to the lives of displaced farmers and immigrant laborers, striking miners and refugees. She recorded their experiences of food insecurity, of jailings and beatings by sheriffs and strike-breakers with a sympathetic ear and an unblinking eye. Whether real or fictional, the people in these pages may suffer within a system that fails them more often than not, but they are also bursting with potential and desire. Here are a former prostitute, fully trained and working as a surgeon in a Moscow hospital in the early days of the Soviet Union; an ambitious proto-feminist war worker creating her own business; a reformed gambler looking forward to one last honest game. Babb advocates for workers in her journalism and in her short stories she expresses the beauty and pain of struggling individuals. While some of Babb's stories may seem quaint to modern readers, they survive the test of time through their powerful evocation of a sense of place, sensitivity to complex family relationships, and environmental or even eco-feminist sensibility Included are short stories published in literary and progressive journals as diverse as Kansas Magazine and The Anvil, reportage written for New Masses, The Clipper, and New Theater, as well as a small selection of previously unpublished fiction and reportage. One of Babb's most frequently republished short stories, "The Wild Flower," completes the selection. This new collection includes Babb's preface to her four-story collection The Dark Earth and a new introduction by Erin Royston Battat.

The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression

Acclaimed writer Sonora Babb was born in Oklahoma in 1907 and grew up in eastern Colorado, where her parents struggled to homestead. As an adult, she worked as a journalist, country schoolteacher and college writing teacher. Her marriage to a cinematographer took her around the world. Babb mined and transformed her experiences into the novels and stories collected in this volume.

Stories

Cry of the Tinamou

An autobiographical novel, long out of print, continues Sanora Babb's story as begun in her memoir, An Owl on Every Post. Set in Kansas in the early 1930s, it is a rich character study of a classic American individualist and his family. The father, a gambler, is a complex and magnetic man, portrayed from the perspective of his brave and proud daughter, Robin. Against the dark background of his declining fortunes stand Robin's high spirits and intelligence as she experiences the turbulent emotions of first sexual love and rebels against the circumstances of the gambler's rambling life. The novel's depiction of the Great Depression era and its lost families is one that will haunt readers long after the final page. The author's first book manuscript was her Dust Bowl novel Whose Names Are Unknown, which Random House didn't publish because The Grapes of Wrath came out first. Thus, The Lost Traveler, published in 1958, was her first published, and well-received, novel. www.sanorababb.com “There is a good deal of laughter in The Lost Traveler. There is a good deal of tragedy in it, too, for Miss Babb has given us a living and unflinchingly honest picture of a wandering gambler and his family. This is her first novel and she shows herself to be a searching storyteller. A living and unflinchingly honest picture." - New York Times “Strongly recommended. A fascinating story of a professional nomadic gambler who starts by being a hero in the eyes of his wife and daughters and ends in lonely disgrace: occasionally embarrassing, frequently funny, and as an account of the development of family relationships good by any standards." London Sunday Times“. . a remarkable job of making the hero sympathetic and understandable in spite of his occupation and occasional brutality. [The author] has made the whole family come alive, particularly Robin, the only member of the family with fortitude enough to stand up to her father." Los Angeles Mirror News ". . . spare and accurate in its depiction of the stark Kansas towns of the 1930s" -- Mary Clearman Blew, author of All But the Waltz and editor with Kim Barnes of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers "A brilliant first novel." -- Los Angeles Times

The Lost Traveler

The Lost Traveller

Ed. : Sanora Babb, Leslie Edgley, Thomas McGrath, Wilma Shore, [etc...]. Vol. II. No 2, Winter 1953

The California Quarterly

This new collection of Sanora Babb's poems spans more than sixty years of writing and publishing poetry. Many of her earliest poems are added to those of her later years in the original Told in the Seed. The introduction by Carol S. Loranger notes that "Of all Sanora Babb's writings, it is the poetry, perhaps, that offers the most intimate and unvarnished picture of the woman and the artist." In the introduction Loranger weaves together relevant information about Babb's life with the more personal poems to further enhance the reader's appreciation. Babb won the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 for "Told in the Seed" and the Gold Medal Award in 1932 for "Captive" from the Mitre Press Anthology, London. With a strong empathy with people and their daily lives, an affinity with all in the natural world, and the ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary, Babb reflects all this in her poetry. Sanora Bab's enthusiasm and reverence for nature is infectious and refreshes our senses. She makes us aware that "we invade this timeless space." With subtle wit and precise word choice, Babb speaks directly to the reader in a conversational tone making spot-on observations. Her figurative language brings mystery and aliveness to our world where "walls of this canyon pulse like our blood." In passionate love poems Babb shows delight in love and relationships, yet with respect for partings. Instead of a sense of loss, the connection between human spirits and nature is revealed as its natural order. -Sandra Berris, author of Ash on Wind This beautifully edited retrospective on the poetry of Sanora Babb reveals the haunting timelessness of her work. Her use of whimsy, detail and irony makes her feel quite contemporary. Her imagery complicates her verse without making it obscure: "I am a wind/That will trouble/Your door/And never/Come in." But most impressive is her ability to conclude a poem at precisely the right moment when "Language is undone,/Thoughts translate/To pure meaning." -Cathryn Essinger, author of The Apricot and the Moon

Told in the Seed and Selected Poems

By Sanora Babb

"Sanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugout's dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably Whose Names Are Unknown. The author was seven when her parents began to homestead an isolated 320-acre farm on the western plains. She tells the story through her eyes as a sensitive, fearless young girl who came to love the wind, the vastness, the mystery and magic in the ordinary. This evocative memoir of a pioneer childhood on the Great Plains is written with the lyricism and sensitivity that distinguishes all of Sanora Babb's writing. An Owl on Every Post, with its environmental disasters, extreme weather, mortgage foreclosures, and harsh living conditions, resonates as much today as when it first appeared. What this true story of Sanora's prairie childhood reveals best are the values - courage, pride, determination, and love - that allowed her family to prevail over total despair"--Amazon.com book description.

Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt’s father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Duanne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless “Okies” and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can’t possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb wrote Whose Names are Unknown in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those “whose names are unknown.” In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.

Whose Names Are Unknown

Lew Amster

The Killer Instinct & Other Stories from the Great Depression

The 1930s exodus of "Okies" dispossessed by repeated droughts and failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work risked sublimating the subjects—real people and actual experience—into aesthetic artifacts, icons of suffering, deprivation, and despair. Working for the Farm Security Administration in California's migrant labor camps in 1938-39, Sanora Babb, a young journalist and short story writer, together with her sister Dorothy, a gifted amateur photographer, entered the intimacy of the dispossessed farmers' lives as insiders, evidenced in the immediacy and accuracy of their writings and photos. Born in Oklahoma and raised on a dryland farm, the Babb sisters had unparalleled access to the day-by-day harsh reality of field labor and family life. This book presents a vivid, firsthand account of the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrant labor camps, and the growth of labor activism among Anglo and Mexican farm workers in California's agricultural valleys linked by the "Dirty Plate Trail" (Highway 99). It draws upon the detailed field notes that Sanora Babb wrote while in the camps, as well as on published articles and short stories about the migrant workers and an excerpt from her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Like Sanora's writing, Dorothy's photos reveal an unmediated, personal encounter with the migrants, portraying the social and emotional realities of their actual living and working conditions, together with their efforts to organize and to seek temporary recreation. An authority in working-class literature and history, volume editor Douglas Wixson places the Babb sisters' work in relevant historical and social-political contexts, examining their role in reconfiguring the Dust Bowl exodus as a site of memory in the national consciousness. Focusing on the material conditions of everyday existence among the Dust Bowl refugees, the words and images of these two perceptive young women clearly show that, contrary to stereotype, the "Okies" were a widely diverse people, including not only Steinbeck's sharecropper "Joads" but also literate, independent farmers who, in the democracy of the FSA camps, found effective ways to rebuild lives and create communities.

Sanora Babb

About

Books

Join the club