Sanora Babb: No Longer Overshadowed by Steinbeck

Sanora Babb wrote her Depression era novel To Whose Names are Unknown in 1939, but it was not published until 2004, 65 years after it was first written. Why did it take so long? This was because John Steinbeck published his novel first.

Courtesy of Joanne Dearcopp, Literary Executor of the Babb Estate

Babb was born in 1907 to Walter and Jeanette Babb in Otoe Territory which is located in present day Oklahoma. The family moved often due to her father’s gambling lifestyle living in Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and finally settling back in Oklahoma where Babb graduated high school as the valedictorian. Unfortunately, she did not receive the recognition due to her fathers unpopular profession. After graduation, Sanora attended college in Kansas and got a job working for the Associated Press. Realizing she wanted to be a writer, Babb moved to California right before the stock market crashed, losing her job and becoming homeless for a while. During the 1930s, Babb received her BA from the University of Southern California and became involved in the literary movement there making friends with Ralph Ellison, Dorthy Parker, and filmmaker James Wong Howard, whom she married in 1937 in Paris according to the Sanora Babb: An Inventory of Her Papers in the Manuscript Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

Returning to California, Babb got a job working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) under Tom Collins who was the FSA director. Her experiences in the migrant camps affected her greatly as many of the farm workers were from her home state of Oklahoma. Part of her job with the FSA was to take field notes of the migrant’s experiences which Sanora expertly documented. During this time, the already famous author John Steinbeck visited the migrant camps to better understand the situation as he was also researching own novel. Smithsonian Magazine explains what happened next in an article in 2016: Tom Collins shared the FSA field notes with Steinbeck. In fact, Collins shared so much information that John Steinbeck dedicated his novel to him. It is not clear which notes were shared or that Steinbeck knew who wrote the field notes, but since Babb was a writer working on a novel of the same subject, one can suspect that her field notes would have been most useful.

Between letters from Babb’s mother back in Kansas describing the full effect of the Dust Bowl from a first hand perspective, to her personal interviews with thousands of migrants, Babb wrote and submitted  the first two chapters of her novel to Random House in New York which gave her a contract and an advance, a bold move for an unknown woman writer in the 1930s. After Babb finished her novel, she received news that Random House had withdrawn their offer. John Steinbeck had published The Grapes of Wrath in April 1939, and the publishers felt that the market would not support two novels on the same subject.

After her novel was rejected, Babb stayed involved in the literary movement. She continued writing and publishing poetry and short stories receiving recognition for both. She was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee for her leftist viewpoints, so she moved to Mexico while she wrote her second novel The Lost Traveler in 1958. When Babb returned to California, she continued writing with her literary circle including her longtime friend Ray Bradbury. Sanora Babb’s memoir, An Owl on Every Post was published in 1970.

Babb’s original novel sat undiscovered until 2004 when the University of Oklahoma Press finally published To Whose Names are Unknown 65 years after it was written. Receiving much critical acclaim, some critics say that Babb crafted a novel that is better than Steinbeck's. This novel brings forth a female voice that lovingly describes the landscape of the plains, the harsh realities of the Dust Bowl while taking great care to describe the plight of the migrant families. Sanora Babb died in 2005, a year after publication.

While she is not yet a household name, Sanora Babb is finally starting to receive the recognition she deserves. She has been profiled in Ken Burns award-winning documentary, The Dust Bowl. In the past year, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, published Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, and The New York Times best selling author Kristin Hannah who wrote The Four Winds discussed how she was inspired by Sanora Babb in her 2021 New York Times interview.

While To Whose Names are Unknown may have taken 65 years to be brought into the public light, Sanora Babb’s name will eventually be known to all.