Joan E. Bauer: Remembering Sanora Babb

Ray Bradbury knew Babb from a longtime workshop:
The author of a promising Dust Bowl novel

that editor Bennet Cerf shelved in ‘39, saying—
What rotten luck! claiming her work ‘an anti-climax’

after Grapes of Wrath. Someone else, Bradbury recalls,
would have stopped writing after such a blow.

*

In Oklahoma Territory, Babb learned to read
from newspapers & The Adventures of Kit Carson.

Dogged by her father’s gambling & stubbornness,
the family lived in an earthen dugout in Colorado

as he tried to grow broomcorn. Babb entered school
at eleven. Then valedictorian.

She headed west for the LA Times—the job gone
with the Crash. Destitute for years, she slept in parks,

worked as a studio secretary & scriptwriter for radio.
She joined the John Reed Club, the Communist Party.

A trip to the USSR, an affair with Ralph Ellison.
She volunteered with the Farm Security Administration,

organized camps & protests. Unknowable:
How much Babb’s field notes on migrants

forwarded by her boss Tom Collins to Steinbeck
—without her knowledge—shaped his epic novel.

*

Sanora Babb met James Wong Howe in Hollywood.
Pickwick Bookshop. Friendship, then a love-match.

They married. Twice. I think about her running
that Chinese restaurant in North Hollywood for him.

But she did & devoted herself to the marriage
all the while writing scripts, poems, short stories.

A widow for three decades, after Howe died.
At 97, a flurry of glowing reviews.

Her Dustbowl novel, published at last:
Whose Names Were Unknown.

Copyright 2024 Joan E. Bauer

Joan E. Bauer‘s poetry collections include Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023). She divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.