Sanora Babb 
Sanora Babb and Ken Burn’s PBS “Dust Bowl”(My note: I wondered how a Caucasian girl fell in love withe a Chinese boy in 1920s, 1930s - the dark years for inter-racial marriage)
Several persons have asked if I’m related to the Sanora Babb featured in Ken Burn’s recent PBS “Dust Bowl” documentary. After reading her memoir, An Owl on Every Post, years ago, I was determined to meet the author of this wonderful childhood family story. We are distant cousins, and I was fortunate to get to know her in the last years of her life before she died in 2005 at the age of 98. I quickly fell in love with her, influenced no doubt because she looked like and reminded me of the Babb aunts whom I lived with in my early childhood. I miss her.
Sanora’s life story and her novel about the Dust Bowl victims, Whose Names Are Unknown, are part of the Ken Burns documentary. In it, he tells how she wrote her novel in the late 30s while helping Tom Collins set up the FSA migrant camps in California, but Random House reneged on their contract because a similar book, The Grapes of Wrath, had just been published. Her novel of the Dust Bowl and its devastating effects on farmers in Oklahoma and Kansas, where she was born and lived until she went to Los Angeles in 1929, reflects her personal experiences there and in the camps of California. Critics note the book’s authenticity, but more important for us readers are the compelling characters she brings to life.
She arrived in LA, incidentally, on the day the stock market crashed. The job she had taken with the Associated Press evaporated, and homeless she had to live for a while in Jefferson Park. She said the LA police checked the park at night to be sure the “campers,” many of whom were women, were safe. That’s not the picture of LA police we have today.
Through Sanora I got to know her long-time friend and literary executor, Joanne Dearcopp, whose personal mission is to gain wider recognition of Sanora’s work. Joanne is organizing the re-publication of her out-of-print works and seeking a producer for a script of Whose Names Are Unknown.
Recently republished, with a new Foreword by Pulitzer Prize author William Kennedy, is An Owl on Every Post, Sanora’s beautifully written memoir of her life as a child in Baca County, Colorado. There she lived in a dugout with her parents and grandfather for a couple of years during their failed efforts to raise broomcorn. Being republished this fall is her autobiographical novel, The Lost Traveler, of her adolescent years when her father was a small-town gambler.
Sanora wrote five books as well as essays, short stories and poems published in literary magazines alongside the work of Dorothy Parker, Ralph Ellison, William Saroyan, Katherine Anne Porter, and Ernest Hemingway. For more background see her website, a web exhibition with her sister Dorothy’s photos in the camps, and a recent article “Rediscovering a National Treasure” in Foreword Reviews. The picture at the beginning of this post is Sanora in the California worker fields in the 1930s.
12 Responses to Sanora Babb and Ken Burn’s PBS “Dust Bowl”
Sanora Babb (21 April 1907, Oklahoma – 31 December 2005, Hollywood Hills) was an American novelist, poet and literary editor. She was also the wife of famed cinematographer James Wong Howe. 
Sanora and James Wong Howe with dog
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/babb/bio/3.html
Sanora in her 80s, Hollywood, California
Los Angeles Writers Group, ca. 1955
ers she had come to know and drafted the manuscript of her second novel, The Lost Traveler (1958). Among her new friends in Mexico were novelist B. Traven, dancer Waldeen, instrumental in integrating Mexican folk dance into classical ballet, and numerous blacklisted Hollywood writers such as Albert Maltz, Bernard Gordon, and Cedric Belfrage.
Returning to Los Angeles she continued to write and publish well into her eighties. In the 1950s and ‘60s she met regularly with a writers' group that included Ray Bradbury, Esther McCoy, Sid Stebel, Bonnie Barrett Wolfe, C. Y. Lee, Peg Nixon, Richard Bach, and Dolph Sharp. Revived interest in the radical literature of the 1930s, spurned by publishers during the repressive Cold War years, prompted Babb after some sixty years to release the re-edited manuscript of Whose Names Are Unknown. Its publication in 2004 won enthusiastic critical praise, including a Los Angeles Times review claiming that Babb's Dust Bowl novel rivaled Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Sanora Babb continues to gain a steadily growing readership and critical recognition as a novelist of extraordinary sensitivity, valued for her clarity, honesty, and craftsmanship. Other publications include the novels The Lost Traveler (1958), An Owl on Every Post (1971), a collection of short stories entitled The Cry of the Tinamou (1997), and a book of poems, Told in the Seed. Preceded in death by her sister Dorothy in 1995, Sanora died at age 98 on December 31, 2005, at her home in Hollywood, California.
http://www.sanorababb.com/newsletter.htm
More photos will be added over time.
Official website for the author Sanora Babb
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WelcomeSanora Babb was born in Oklahoma Territory in 1907 where she developed a life-long affinity with Native American beliefs and community life based on the Otoes she knew as a child in Red Rock. There the local chief named her Little Cheyenne Who Rides Like the Wind—a name in which she took great pride. In 1913, her family moved from small town security to an utterly isolated 320-acre broomcorn farm on the vast, dry High Plains where they spent five years homesteading in eastern Colorado. (Her memoir An Owl on Every Post depicts these years.) After repeated crop failures, they moved back to the Oklahoma Panhandle where Sanora and her sister, Dorothy, were able to attend school. She had her first job at the age of twelve, working for a printer in exchange for a free supply of handbills for her theater. There were other jobs on local newspapers, a farming magazine and as a teacher.
In An Owl on Every Post, Sanora wrote, “Its loneliness stretched my soul beyond my years to a mysterious sense of a time when I should reach that far land’s end and lift up the sky to enter the lives and the worlds I had no need to know until then.” That time arrived when, in 1929, she moved to Los Angeles to seek work as a journalist, having already sold her short stories and poems to literary magazines all around the country. In the late 1930s, Sanora became the assistant to Tom Collins and helped to set up the FSA government camps for migrant workers in California. It is here that she drafted her Dust Bowl refugee novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Random House’s editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, he explained that the market couldn’t support two books on the subject. Her manuscript remained in a drawer until finally published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004. Sanora and her novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, were featured on the Ken Burns Dust Bowl documentary that first aired on PBS in the fall of 2012. This and the republishing of her out-of-print books by Muse Ink Press has spurred a rediscovery of Sanora Babb’s work. She is the author of seven books, as well as numerous essays, short stories, and poems that were published in literary magazines alongside the work of Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, William Saroyan, and William Carlos Williams. On December 31, 2005, Sanora Babb died at her home in Hollywood Hills, but the enthusiastic interest of new readers and scholars is keeping her legacy alive. |
I read Tim Eagan’s book twice a few years back and ave had wonderful conversations with mt dad who grew up in Tulsa….more and more do I realize how much that part of his life shaped him to this day and why he is the way he is….
fYI Ken Burns loves Telluride and premiers all of his films there for critiques and feedback before the final cuts and they Are distributed around the country- did you happen to see the film his daughter worked on regarding the rape that took place in Central Park- she is talented as well.
I have enjoyed reading your blogs- thanks to Ellen Colon! Patty
Thanks for the comments, Patty. I wasn’t aware of Ken Burns daughter’s film. Over the years I think his documentaries have made an enormous contribution to all of us.
I think you’ll enjoy Sanora’s book” Whose Names Are Unknown.” I grew up during the 30s in NW Mo and while we weren’t directly affected by the dust storms our relatives in Kansas and relatives of our neighbors were and some did migrate to California out of necessity. The stories those people told were like the ones Sanora tells in her book.
Frank
I think you’ll enjoy it.
Frank
Welcome back.
Seeing Sanora’s picture, and the life she had to endure, she was fit to be a top actress in Hollywood. If she only had met the right people and/or had the attitude/character.
I look forward reading her book..
I enjoyed your stories about Sanora, her early days in LA where I lived 25 years later and seeing her photo. She looks like a twin of one of my cousins. I will try to find one of her books on the dust bowl and its results.
“Whose Names Are Unknown” is a well written and moving story of this national tragedy that until Ken Burns’ program was largely forgotten. I also highly recommend “An Owl on Every Post” for Sanora’s upbeat recounting of her family’s tragic years in eastern Colorado.
Frank
Reading this past week of the drought in New Mexico (and seeing first hand the extensive loss of topsoil there) I wonder how soon the entire Southwest will be the next Dust Bowl. Visiting old relatives on my father’s side of the family, farmers in southwest Kansas, I heard recordings of the jackrabbit kills and saw photos of their personal woes. Your posts are always so thoughtful, Frank. And thought provoking! Jan
Thanks for commenting, Jan. In “Whose Names are Unknown” you’ll revisit the stories your relatives told of their hardships.
Frank
Just ordered the book and looking forward to reading it….thanks…Patty
Are you related to the Babbs who came in to New Hampshire in late 1600s?
Deborah,
I apologize for the delay in responding to your message in November. I thought I had, but of course hadn’t, and just discovered my error this morning.
I’m a descendent of Phillip Babb who came to the Isles of Shoals in the 1640s. His son Thomas was my ancestor and Sanora’s. Thomas lived for a time as a youth in Hampton, NH. When the Hussey family of that town moved to New Castle, Delaware, Thomas followed and married their daughter Bathsheba. The Husseys were Quakers and, feeling discriminated against, moved to Delaware which had a large Quaker community. From there his and Bathsheba’s descendants moved westward every two or three generations to Northern VA, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa from which my grandfather moved to northwest Missouri at the turn of the 20th century.
If you are a Babb, you might be interested in joining the Babb Association. Dan Babb is currently the President and family historian and genealogist. Dan lives in Dallas and his email address is daniel@dbabb.net . The Association blog is at http://babbunabridged.com .
If you have other questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reply. My email address is frank@frankbabb.com .http://www.frankbabb.com/sanora-babb-and-ken-burns-pbs-dust-bowl/#.V2r1A9L2bOE