Sanora Babb

Sanora Babb (April 21, 1907 – December 31, 2005) was an American novelist, poet, and literary editor.

Sanora Babb
Born(1907-04-21)April 21, 1907
Red Rock, Oklahoma, U.S.
DiedDecember 31, 2005(2005-12-31) (aged 98)
Los Angeles, California U.S.
Pen nameSylvester Davis[1]
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • editor
  • poet
Alma materUniversity of Kansas
Garden City Community College
Notable worksAn Owl on Every Post
Whose Names Are Unknown
SpouseJames Wong Howe

Early life and career

Sanora Babb was born in Otoe territory in what is now Red Rock, Oklahoma; neither of her parents was of the Otoe group of Native Americans.[2] Her father Walter[3] was a professional gambler. He moved Sanora and her sister Dorothy to a one-room dugout on a broomcorn farm settled by her grandfather near Lamar, Colorado.[4]

Babb fictionalized her experiences in her novels An Owl on Every Post and The Lost Traveler.

Babb did not start attending school until she was 11, and she graduated from high school as valedictorian.[2] She began studying at the University of Kansas[3] but when her finances made it impossible to continue she transferred after one year to a junior college in Garden City, Kansas.[2]

Babb began her career in journalism at the Garden City Herald,[2] and several of her articles were redistributed by the Associated Press. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to work for the Los Angeles Times, but the newspaper retracted its initial offer following the U.S. stock market crash of 1929. Babb was occasionally homeless during the Depression, sleeping at times in Lafayette Park. She eventually found secretarial work with Warner Brothers and wrote scripts for radio station KFWB. Babb joined the John Reed Club and was a member of the U.S. Communist Party for 11 years,[5] visiting the Soviet Union in 1936.[2]

In 1938, Babb returned to California to work for the Farm Security Administration.[6] While with the FSA, she kept detailed notes on the tent camps of the Dust Bowl migrants to California.[6] Without her knowledge, Babb's supervisor Tom Collins shared the notes with John Steinbeck.[7] She turned the stories she collected into her novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish the novel with Random House, but the publication of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath caused publication to be shelved in 1939.[8] Her novel was not published until 2004.

In the early 1940s, Babb was the West Coast secretary of the League of American Writers. She edited the literary magazine The Clipper and its successor The California Quarterly, helping to introduce the work of Ray Bradbury and B. Traven. At the same time, she ran a Chinese restaurant owned by her future husband James Wong Howe.

During the early years of the HUAC hearings, Babb was blacklisted,[9] and moved to Mexico City to protect Howe, who was "graylisted", from further harassment.[3]

Babb resumed publishing books in 1958 with her novel The Lost Traveler, followed in 1970 by her memoir An Owl on Every Post. Both of those were fictionalized treatments of her early life. Babb's shelved Dust Bowl novel Whose Names Are Unknown was released by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004.[10] (The town in An Owl On Every Post is Two Buttes, in Baca County, to the south of Lamar which is in Prowers County.)

Personal life
Babb with her husband James Wong Howe

Starting in 1932 Babb had a long friendship with writer William Saroyan that grew into an unrequited love affair on Saroyan's part.[11] She also had an affair with Ralph Ellison between 1941 and 1943.[12]

She met her future husband, the Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry,[9] but their marriage was not recognized in California because it had an anti-miscegenation law that prohibited marriage between people of different races.[6] Howe's traditional Chinese views prevented him from cohabiting with Babb while they were legally unwed, so they maintained separate apartments in the same building.[13] Howe's studio contract had a "morals clause" that prohibited him from publicly acknowledging their marriage as well.

They would not marry in California until 1948, after the mixed-race plaintiffs Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis brought a lawsuit (Perez v. Sharp) that resulted in overturning the state ban.[14] It took Howe and Babb three days to find a judge who agreed to marry them, and who reportedly remarked, "She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a chink, that's her business."[15]

Works
Library resources about
Sanora Babb
By Sanora Babb
  • 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, ISBN 978-0-88496-283-0
  • Cry of the Tinamou, 1997, Muse Ink Press (27. Juli 2021), ISBN 978-0985991555
  • Told in the Seed, 1998, Muse Ink Press (30. Juli 2021), ISBN 978-0985991548
  • Whose Names Are Unknown, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8061-3579-4
  • On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps, 2007, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-292-71445-8

References
  1. "Sanora Babb: An Inventory of Her Papers in the Manuscript Collection at the Harry Ransom Center". University of Texas. Retrieved 3 April 2013. The Photography of James Wong Howe, notes and photocopy of published article by Sylvester Davis, pseudonym used by Sanora Babb (published in California Arts and Architecture, 1939)
  2. Babb, Sanora (2007). On the dirty plate trail remembering the Dust Bowl refugee camps (1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-292-71445-8.
  3. Biography at the Harry Ransom Center
  4. Laughlin, Mildred, ed. (1980). The Rocky Mountains. Chicago: American Library Association. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-8389-0296-7. ...at the age of seven, Sonora Babb found herself beginning a new life...
  5. Horne, Gerald (2001). Class struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: moguls, mobsters, stars, Reds, & trade unionists (1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. p. 89. ISBN 978-0-292-73138-7. a party member of 11 years
  6. Woo, Elaine (January 21, 2006). "Sanora Babb, 98; novelist's masterpiece rivaled Steinbeck's". Los Angeles Times.
  7. "The Dust Bowl – Sanora Babb biography". PBS. Retrieved 21 November 2012. Unbeknownst to Babb, Collins was sharing her reports with writer John Steinbeck. Some of this reporting informed Steinbeck's 1936 series of articles The Harvest Gypsies. By the time she was ready to publish her work, in the winter of 1939, Steinbeck had come out with his own Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's book was dedicated to Tom Collins and was an immediate best-seller—such a hit, New York editors told Babb, that the market could not bear another on the same subject.
  8. "Novelist and Poet Sanora Babb". The Washington Post. January 9, 2006.
  9. Chang, Gordon H.; Johnson, Mark Dean; Karlstrom, Paul J.; Spain, Sharon, eds. (2008). Asian American Art: a history, 1850-1970. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. p. 333. ISBN 978-0-8047-5752-2.
  10. Lanzendorfer, Joy (May 23, 2016). "The Forgotten Dust Bowl Novel That Rivaled The Grapes of Wrath". Smithsonian Magazine.
  11. Balakian, Nona (1998). The World of William Saroyan (2. print. ed.). Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press. pp. 273–75. ISBN 978-0-8387-5368-2. I have never stopped thinking of you as somebody rare and extraordinary and fine and wonderful and truly beautiful.
  12. Jackson, Lawrence (2007). Ralph Ellison : emergence of genius. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. pp. 215–16. ISBN 978-0-8203-2993-2. Retrieved 30 March 2011.
  13. See, Lisa (2009). On Gold Mountain. Rosetta Books. pp. 214–15. ISBN 978-0-7953-0496-5. Retrieved March 29, 2011.
  14. 32 Cal. 2d 711, 198 P. 2d 17 (Cal. 1948).
  15. Lee, James (August 1, 1996). "Master DP James Wong Howe". MovieMaker. Retrieved May 1, 2023. When the miscegenation laws were repealed, it took them three days to find a judge who would marry them. When they finally did, the judge remarked 'She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a chink, that's her business.'
Further reading
  • Joanne Dearcopp, Christine Hill Smith (Ed.): Unknown no more: recovering Sanora Babb, Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, [2021], ISBN 978-0-8061-6936-1
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