Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008
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.

On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)

History

Babb, Sanora

Americas

University of Texas Press

Business & Money

Economics

An unsentimental portrait of homesteading in eastern Colorado, through the eyes of a young woman and her family living quietly courageous lives under primitive circumstances.

An owl on every post

P. Davies

Born in Oklahoma in 1907 to a restless small-town baseball player, gambler, and baker and his long-suffering wife, Sanora Babb and her sister lived as children on the arid and wind-swept prairie of eastern Colorado as their parents struggled vainly to homestead. As an adult, Babb worked for small-town newspapers and a farming magazine, as a country schoolteacher and as a college writing teacher. During the Great Depression she worked in the California fields setting up government camps for migrant workers. She also traveled extensively with her cine-matographer husband James Wong Howe, living on film locations throughout the world. Babb mined and transformed all of this and more in her novels and stories. Two of the stories collected here, "The Santa Ana" and "The Wild Flower," have been widely anthologized. Two others, "Cry of the Tinamou" and "Davy," were written specifically for this volume.

Cry of the Tinamou: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Bison Books

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: A Novel

Contemporary

University of Oklahoma Press

Whose Names Are Unknown

An Owl on Every Post

In this memoir, first published in 1970 and long out of print, Sanora Babb recalls her family's attempt to practice dry-land farming in eastern Colorado in 1913. Leaving the relative security of a small town in Oklahoma, the mother and two daughters travel by train and wagon to join the father and grandfather at their isolated dugout. Here, Sanora (nicknamed Cheyenne) gradually comes to love her withdrawn grandfather and to appreciate the harsh beauty of the prairie environment.

Univ of New Mexico Pr

Set in Kansas in the 1930s, this is the gripping story of a professional gambler, Des Tannehill, and his family. The father, a complex and magnetic man, is portrayed from the perspective of his willful and proud daughter Robin. A rich character study of the classic American individualist, The Lost Traveler also presents a picture, rare in American literature, of a brave, self-reliant young woman. Against the dark background of Tannehill's 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 Depression-era America and its lost families is one that will haunt readers long after the final page.

The Lost Traveler

In this memoir, first published in 1970 and long out of print, Sanora Babb recalls her family's attempt to practice dry-land farming in eastern Colorado in 1913. Leaving the relative security of a small town in Oklahoma, the mother of and two daughters travel by train and wagon to join the father and grandfather at their isolated dugout. Here, Senora (nicknamed Cheyenne) gradually comes to love her withdrawn grandfather and to appreciate the harsh beauty of the prairie environment. Cheyenne's experiences range from rare encounters with other settlers to the constant threat of hunge to warm and mystical relationships with animals. They are related with a child's sense of wonder and played out against the background of the plains--clear air, vast distances, rapid changes in light and shadow, and sudden, dangerous storms.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

McCall

Celebrated in the 1930s for her fiction and reportage, Sanora Babb has recently been rediscovered. Born in Oklahoma in 1907, Babb is a pioneering woman author comparable to Meridel Le Sueur, Lillian Hellman, and Tillie Olsen. Remarkably, this is her first collection of poetry, which is extraordinary in its delicay and assurance, comparable in forthrightness, dramatic quality, and sound effects to the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Many of her poems have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and The San Francisco Review.

Told in the Seed

Poetry

West End Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Babb, Sanora. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Babb, Sanora

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Babb, Sanora. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)

On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)

An owl on every post

Cry of the Tinamou: Stories

Whose Names Are Unknown: A Novel

Whose Names Are Unknown

An Owl on Every Post

The Lost Traveler

An Owl on Every Post

Told in the Seed