Sanora Babb (April 21, 1907 – December 31, 2005) was an American novelist, poet, and
literary editor A literary editor is an editor in a newspaper, magazine or similar publication who deals with aspects concerning literature and books, especially reviews. .
Early life and career
![James Wong Howe with his wife, Sanora Babb](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/James_Wong_Howe_with_his_wife%2C_Sanora_Babb.jpg)
Sanora Babb was born in
Otoe
The Otoe (Chiwere: Jiwére) are a Native American people of the Midwestern United States. The Otoe language, Chiwere, is part of the Siouan family and closely related to that of the related Iowa, Missouria, and Ho-Chunk tribes.
Historically, t ...
territory in what is now Oklahoma, though neither her mother nor father were of the Otoe group of Native Americans.
Her father, Walter,
[Biography]
at the Harry Ransom Center
The Harry Ransom Center (until 1983 the Humanities Research Center) is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the Americas and Europe for the pur ...
a professional gambler, moved Sanora and her sister Dorothy to a one-room dugout on a
broomcorn
''Sorghum'' () is a genus of about 25 species of flowering plants in the grass family ( Poaceae). Some of these species are grown as cereals for human consumption and some in pastures for animals. One species is grown for grain, while many ot ...
farm settled by her grandfather near
Lamar, Colorado
Lamar is the home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Prowers County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 7,804 at the 2010 United States Census. The city was named after Confederate s ...
.
(The town in ''
An Owl On Every Post'' is
Two Buttes, in
Baca County
Baca County is a county located in the U.S. state of Colorado. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,506. The county seat is Springfield.
Located at the southeast corner of Colorado, the county shares state borders with Kansas, New Mexic ...
, to the south of Lamar which is in
Prowers County.)
Her experiences were fictionalized in her novels ''An Owl on Every Post'' and ''The Lost Traveler''. She did not start attending school until she was 11, and she graduated from high school as valedictorian.
She began studying at the University of Kansas
but she could not afford to continue there and after one year transferred to junior College in Garden City, Kansas.
Her first work in journalism was with the ''Garden City Herald'',
and several of her articles were reprinted by the
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to work for the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'', but due to the
U.S. stock market crash of 1929 the newspaper retracted its offer. She occasionally was homeless through the Depression, sleeping in Lafayette Park. She eventually found secretarial work with
Warner Brothers
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American Film studio, film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, Califo ...
and wrote scripts for radio station
KFWB
KFWB (980 AM) is a commercial radio station in Los Angeles, California. It airs a classic Regional Mexican music format. KFWB is owned by Lotus Communications. The station has a colorful history, being the radio voice of Warner Bros. Studios i ...
. She joined the
John Reed Club
The John Reed Clubs (1929–1935), often referred to as John Reed Club (JRC), were an American federation of local organizations targeted towards Marxist writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist and activist John ...
and was a member of the
U.S. Communist Party
The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revo ...
for 11 years,
visiting the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
in 1936.
In 1938, she returned to California to work for the
Farm Security Administration.
[Elaine Woo]
Sanora Babb, 98; novelist's masterpiece rivaled Steinbeck's
''Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'', 21 January 2006 While with FSA, she kept detailed notes on the tent camps of the
Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of both natural factors (severe drought) an ...
migrants to California.
Without her knowledge, the notes were given to
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social ...
by her supervisor Tom Collins.
She turned the stories she collected into her novel, ''
Whose Names Are Unknown''.
Bennett Cerf
Bennett Alfred Cerf (May 25, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was an American writer, publisher, and co-founder of the American publishing firm Random House. Cerf was also known for his own compilations of jokes and puns, for regular personal appearanc ...
planned to publish the novel with
Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...
, but the appearance of Steinbeck's ''
The Grapes of Wrath
''The Grapes of Wrath'' is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award
and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize ...
'' caused publication to be shelved in 1939. Her novel was not published until 2004.
In the early 1940s Babb was West Coast secretary of the
League of American Writers
The League of American Writers was an association of American novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists, and literary critics launched by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1935. The group included Communist Party members, and so-called " fell ...
. She edited the literary magazine ''The Clipper'' and its successor ''
The California Quarterly'', helping to introduce the work of
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury (; August 22, 1920June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and r ...
and
B. Traven
B. Traven (; Bruno Traven in some accounts) was the pen name of a novelist, presumed to be German, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One certainty about Traven's life is ...
, as well as running a Chinese restaurant owned by Howe.
During the early years of the
HUAC
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloy ...
hearings, Babb was
blacklist
Blacklisting is the action of a group or authority compiling a blacklist (or black list) of people, countries or other entities to be avoided or distrusted as being deemed unacceptable to those making the list. If someone is on a blacklist, t ...
ed,
and moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from further harassment.
Babb resumed publishing books in 1958 with the novel ''The Lost Traveler'', followed in 1970 with her memoir ''An Owl on Every Post''. Babb's shelved novel ''
Whose Names Are Unknown'' was released by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004.
Personal life
Babb had a long friendship with writer
William Saroyan
William Saroyan (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film ''The ...
starting in 1932 that grew into an unrequited love affair on Saroyan's part.
She also had an affair with
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel ''Invisible Man'', which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote ''Shadow and Act'' (1964), a collecti ...
.
She met her future husband, the Chinese-American
cinematographer
The cinematographer or director of photography (sometimes shortened to DP or DOP) is the person responsible for the photographing or recording of a film, television production, music video or other live action piece. The cinematographer is the ch ...
James Wong Howe
Wong Tung Jim, A.S.C. (; August 28, 1899 – July 12, 1976), known professionally as James Wong Howe (Houghto), was a Chinese-born American cinematographer who worked on over 130 films. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was one of the most soug ...
, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry,
but their marriage was not recognized in California, due to the state's
anti-miscegenation law
Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races. Anti-misc ...
(which prohibited marriage between people of different races).
Howe would not cohabit with Babb while they were legally unwed, due to his traditional Chinese views, so they maintained separate apartments in the same building.
Howe's studio contract "morals clause" also prohibited him from publicly acknowledging their marriage.
Indeed, they would not marry until 1948, after plaintiffs Andrea Perez (white) and Sylvester Davis (black) brought a lawsuit (''
Perez v. Sharp
''Perez v. Sharp'', also known as ''Perez v. Lippold'' or ''Perez v. Moroney'', is a 1948 case decided by the Supreme Court of California in which the court held by a 4–3 majority that the state's ban on interracial marriage violated the Fourte ...
)'' in state supreme court, which overturned the prohibition.
[32 Cal. 2d 711, 198 P. 2d 17 (Cal. 1948).] It took Howe and Babb another three days to find a judge who agreed to marry them. Even then, the judge reportedly remarked "She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a chink, that's her business."
Coincidentally, in 1939 Babb had used the pseudonym ''Sylvester Davis'',
the same name as that of the husband in ''
Perez v. Sharp
''Perez v. Sharp'', also known as ''Perez v. Lippold'' or ''Perez v. Moroney'', is a 1948 case decided by the Supreme Court of California in which the court held by a 4–3 majority that the state's ban on interracial marriage violated the Fourte ...
''.
Works
* ''The Lost Traveler'', 1958
* ''An Owl on Every Post'', 1970
* ''The Killer Instinct and Other Stories from the Great Depression'', Santa Barbara, CA : Capra Press, 1987,
* ''Cry of the Tinamou'', 1997, Muse Ink Press (27. Juli 2021),
* ''Told in the Seed'', 1998, Muse Ink Press (30. Juli 2021),
* ''
Whose Names Are Unknown'', Norman, Okla. : University of Oklahoma Press, 2004,
* ''On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps'', 2007, Austin : University of Texas Press, 2007,
Further reading
* Joanne Dearcopp, Christine Hill Smith (Ed.): ''Unknown no more: recovering Sanora Babb'', Norman : University of Oklahoma Press,
021
References
External links
Sanora Babb: Stories from the American High PlainsSanora Babb WebsiteYouTube video about Sanora Babb: The Greatest Writer You've Never Heard Of
{{DEFAULTSORT:Babb, Sanora
1907 births
2005 deaths
American women poets
American women short story writers
20th-century American novelists
American women novelists
Pseudonymous women writers
University of Kansas alumni
21st-century American novelists
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American women writers
20th-century American poets
21st-century American poets
20th-century American short story writers
21st-century American short story writers
20th-century pseudonymous writers
21st-century pseudonymous writers