Sanora Babb, _Whose Names Are Unknown_

AMAZING BACKSTORY TO this novel.

I assume you are familiar with John Steinbeck and his novel The Grapes of Wrath. I always thought of it as a good counter-example to regrettable appropriations like Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt. Steinbeck was not an Oklahoma hardscrabble farmer driven by dust storms to become an exploited migrant laborer in California, yet by telling that story in The Grapes of Wrath, he gripped the conscience of the nation and created an American classic. Everyone wins, right? But then I learned about Sanora Babb.

Sanora Babb was, indeed, from an Oklahoma farm family, and she did move to California in 1929. Later in the 1930s, she did volunteer work in a migrant labor camp, where she began collecting stories and making notes, with a view towards writing a book. The camp’s manager, Tom Collins, was so impressed by the notes that he asked her to make a copy of them for another writer who had been visiting the camp. That writer was John Steinbeck.

Babb did draft a novel and sent it to Random House in early 1939. They were interested, but before Babb could revise her book, Viking published The Grapes of Wrath, which instantly became a bestseller. Random House decided that the book-buying public would not go for two novels about Okies in California in the same year, and so turned down Babb’s book, despite their initial interest. She tried several other publishers, but without success. The lane, so to speak, was occupied. Her novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, was finally published in 2004, when she was 97. She died the next year.

 Is the novel any good? Actually, yes. It's very good. Convincing characters, effective evocations of place, excellent prose, swift pacing, moral urgency...it's excellent, even.

Is it as good as The Grapes of Wrath? Tough question. I would certainly say it has aged better than The Grapes of Wrath. The Tolstoyan ambition of Steinbeck's novel feels creaky these days, while Babb's novel, at just over 200 pages, feels just right. She keeps the exposition minimal and instead zooms in on a few crucial episodes. Steinbeck often seems to be observing the Joads from the outside, but Babb takes us right into the center of the Dunnes--we get a sense of their marriage, their relationship to their kids, their relationships with their friends. They seem real rather than an archetype. We get a lot more of women's perspectives in Babb than we do in Steinbeck, and even some of the Black workers' perspective when the strike comes (I can't remember whether Steinbeck addressed this at all--Babb knows that the crackdown on the strikers is going to fall heaviest on the black workers.) It provides much more explanation of what caused the Dust Bowl than Steinbeck does, and gives a much more immediate sense of living with an environmental disaster.

All in all, if I were to choose just one of these novels for a syllabus, I would go with Babb. In a lot of ways, it seems like it could have been written recently. It's not a classic, of course--but I could see it becoming one.