Whose Names are
Unknown
by Sanora Babb
ISBN:0-8061-3712-6
A 2004 trade
paper release from
University of Oklahoma
Press.
222 pages
It’s 1938 and a young talented,
adventurous woman from the Oklahoma panhandle lands a job with the Farm Security
Administration in California, working with the refugee farmers from her home
state. These were the people of the high plains who saw their farms and their
lives blown away in the horrendous dust storms of the nineteen thirties. The
camps in California were one legacy of the Dust Bowl.
Out of that experience, those
associations, Sanora Babb fashioned this novel, a first-hand up-close story with
intense empathy and understanding for the people. The novel has an interesting
and unfortunate history. In 1939 the author submitted her manuscript to a New
York publisher, Random House. The publisher’s editor, Bennett Cerf called the
novel an exceptionally fine piece of work and planned to publish it. A few
months later, publication was halted in the face of the huge success of John Steinbeck’s
“Grapes of Wrath.”
Sanora Babb went on to a strong
literary career, authoring five books and numerous shorter pieces published in
the top literary magazines of the Twentieth Century. Now finally, sixty-five
years late, this moving, intimate novel is seeing daylight. Is it as good or
better than Steinbeck’s? Read it for yourself and judge. This is no grand
pronouncement to illuminate the scope of what we know as the Dust Bowl Years, “Whose
Names are Unknown” looks poverty and deprivation in the face and deals with the
lives and deaths of those most materially affected.
Babb’s writing is clean, she
wastes no words and the narrative voice brings her fascinating characters to
the pages in a way that will remain with the reader for some time. This is
truly a novel to savor.