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Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb

March 3, 2025 by  
Filed under Fiction, Non-Fiction, WritersCast

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Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb — Iris Jamahl Dunkle — University of California Press — Hardcover — 9780520395442 — 416 pages — $27.95 — October 15, 2024 — ebook versions available at lower prices.
“This absorbing biography, written with both affection and admiration, shows Babb as one of the most indefatigable characters in American literary history.”—The New Republic
Perhaps sparked by years of exploring the shelves of used bookstores and the libraries of older writers,  I’ve long been interested in learning about and reading works by “lost” writers, especially from the early to mid-twentieth century. At various times, I’ve sought out and published some relatively obscure novels and memoirs in hopes of bringing them to the attention of modern readers (if you’re interested in knowing about some of them, get in touch with me and I will send you a list).
Over the years, I had heard of the writer Sanora Babb, and had read some of her poems, though in all honesty her poems did not interest me very much. Then few months ago, I learned more about her writing and her life in an essay called “Correcting for the Male Gaze: On the Unique Challenges of Writing Biographies of Women” by Iris Jamahl Dunkle  that was published in LitHub (a daily online newsletter I recommend to all readers). Inspired by her story, I bought a copy of Sanora Babb’s novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, and was transported by her writing.
That in turn led me to read Iris’s terrific biography of Babb, Riding Like the Wind, in which she tells the story of Babb’s remarkable life, the story of a singular woman.
Babb left her incredibly rough and difficult childhood in Oklahoma and eastern Colorado in the early twentieth century to move to California when she reached adulthood, determined to become a writer. Arriving in Los Angeles just before the onset of the Depression, and becoming involved with radical politics during the 1930s, she had close contact with many writers who later became famous, including Tillie Olsen, Ray Bradbury, and Ralph Ellison.
She was in her own unique style a feminist, whose long relationship with the cinematographer James Wong Howe included what was at the time an illegal marriage, because of California’s anti-miscegenation laws. Later, she was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Throughout her life, she continued to write and participate in literary culture as an editor, struggling to find publishers willing to take on her stories and memoirs about hardscrabble working class people in the plains and in the west.
One of the most impactful incidents in Babb’s life involves John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a book that became an instant bestseller and helped to define the narrative of the Dust Bowl that almost all of us know.  When Steinbeck was struggling to write his novel, his research included visiting FSA camps in central California where Babb was working as a volunteer helping impoverished migrants—people to whom she related well, as they were farmers from the same sorts of places where she grew up. Babb’s supervisor naively asked her to share her field notes with Steinbeck. Sanora had been planning to use those notes to write her own novel about the Dust Bowl experience based on her deep first-hand knowledge of the people and their challenges. Steinbeck literally copied her field research into his manuscript, using her direct experiences to enhance the authenticity of his novel. Babb had no idea that her work was being appropriated, and she continued to work on and finally complete a draft of her own book.
Then, at the very moment Babb was about the sell her manuscript to Random House founder Bennett Cerf, Steinbeck’s book was published to almost instant and vast acclaim, thus killing off any hope it had of being published. It took many years more before her work eventually was published.
While Babb did experience terrible frustration during her lifetime, this biography shows that her influence was widely felt. Ultimately, Babb’s work did make an impact on many. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns’s award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl, and also inspired Kristin Hannah’s bestseller The Four Winds.
Dunkle continues documenting other neglected and lost women writers through her indispensable newsletter, “Finding Lost Voices.“
Iris Jamahl Dunkle earned an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. Her poetry collections include West : Fire : Archive, Interrupted Geographies, Gold Passage, and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Buy Riding Like the Wind (from Bookshop.org)
If you’re interested in knowing more about Sanora Babb, here is a great blog post at UC Press: Ten Intriguing Facts about Fearless Writer Sanora Babb
“The new history is coming, if you dig through the archives with a new gaze.”—Iris Jamahl Dunkle

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Sarah Vogel: The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm

April 14, 2022 by  
Filed under Non-Fiction, WritersCast

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The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm – Sarah Vogel – Bloomsbury – 9781635575262 – 432 pages – hardcover – $28 – ebook edition available at lower prices – November 2, 2021

Many Americans think of North Dakota and the other prairie states as being conservative culturally and equally unprogressive politically. But that view of these predominantly farming states neglects their long histories of progressive populism that goes back over 100 years. That’s true of North Dakota where the Nonpartisan League was active and strong from the 1920s onward (and into the present, where it still exists as the Democratic NPL — much like the Democratic Farm Labor party in Minnesota that Hubert Humphrey represented.

That history provides the backdrop for Sarah Vogel’s true story in The Farmer’s Lawyer, which tells of a seemingly impossible-to-win legal battle, ironically against the US government agency that was established during the Depression to help family farmers, which by the 1970s was helping to destroy them. At the outset of the Reagan administration (Reagan was helped to be elected, ironically, by the support of midwestern farmers), family farmers of all sizes all across the country were experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Land prices, the backbone of farm economics, had gone down, while farm operating costs were up. and interest rates had skyrocketed. At the same time, in many areas, bad weather severely affected crop output.

Because of policies implemented by the Reagan administration, and growing bureaucracy in the Farmers Home Loan administration, many family farmers were being threatened with foreclosure.

At that time, Sarah Vogel, the daughter of a well known Nonpartisan League supporter and lawyer, was herself a young lawyer and single mother was in the process of leaving Washington, D.C., where she had been working for a government agency. Contacted by some desperate farmers from North Dakota who were on the verge of losing their farms, and inspired by her belief in the importance of family farms to American life, she agreed to represent these struggling clients who couldn’t afford to pay her.

In the midst of her own personal issues, but supported by her family and friends, Vogel brought a national class action lawsuit against the FHLA, which meant she would have to fight against the full force of the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, in behalf of these family farmers’ Constitutional rights. As a young lawyer who had never privately practiced before, this was her first case!

This book tells the entire years-long saga in incredible detail, brought to life by Sarah Vogel’s writing skill and storytelling prowess. It’s difficult to imagine a true-to-life legal story that has nothing to do with murder or mayhem being a page-turner, but this book will keep you fully engaged throughout. And it will remind you of how difficult it is for “the little guys” to fight against entrenched bureaucracies, especially the Federal government. It is a heroic story for sure, and credits not only Sarah, but her father, and all the farmers she worked with, who would simply never quit, and whose stolidity made such a huge difference, not only to the outcome of their own case, but for many others that followed them.

This is a story about courage, justice, commitment, and belief in oneself. And it is important for us to be reminded that Americans can stand together for the good of all, especially now, when we can agree on virtually nothing. It is an inspiring journey I appreciated learning about. This is a terrific book, and I think we had a terrific conversation as well.

Sarah Vogel is an attorney and former politician whose career has focused on family farmers and ranchers. Vogel was the first woman in U.S. history to be elected as a state commissioner of agriculture. In 2006, the American Agricultural Law Association awarded her its Distinguished Service Award for contributions to the field of agriculture law, and Willie Nelson honored her at Farm Aid’s thirtieth anniversary in 2015 for her service to farmers. She is an advocate for Native American rights and lives in Bismarck, North Dakota.

“Sarah’s story, told in her unique voice, inspires me–and I’m sure it will inspire you–to fight for family farmers.” –Willie Nelson

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

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Georgia Lowe: The Bonus (a novel)

January 26, 2012 by  
Filed under Fiction, WritersCast

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978-0615371450 – Lucky Dime Press – $18.95 – paperback (ebook editions available)

I confess to be particularly fond of Depression era novels and nonfiction.  The 1920s and 1930s were incredible periods in American history, so much like the present time it is sometimes strange and even eery.  I’m not sure how many readers coming to this novel will know its historical background.  In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, while Hoover was still President, thousands of World War I veterans mobilized to lobby Congress to pass a bill to give them their war service bonuses immediately, to save them from utter poverty and starvation.  2o,000 of them ended up camped in and around Washington, D.C. at the end of their Bonus March.

The political elements of this story sound pretty familiar to anyone who is paying attention to modern political speech.  It’s impossible to not think about the Occupy movement as you read this novel, which of course was conceived and written long before that movement’s inception.

Georgia Lowe’s parents were bonus marchers.  She grew up hearing their stories about the hot summer of 1932 in Washington, D.C., when General MacArthur, himself also a World War I veteran, brutally dispersed the homeless and destitute marchers, including the families of the vets.  Those stories inspired her, but she did not even begin to write fiction until she was much older.  She started the novel more than 10 years ago, using elements of her own family’s stories to create the framework of her novel.

I found The Bonus to be a remarkably well written novel that flows beautifully and naturally.  I’d characterize it as a “naturalistic” novel, and it feels to me as if it could have been written in the 1930s, with a truly authentic sense of the period, the places and the people of that time.  The story focuses on Bonnie and Will, she a struggling actress and he a journalist (and veteran in denial of the pain of his wartime experience), both of them living reasonably well in Hollywood.  They each become connected to the Bonus March in different ways, and end up together in Washington, where their personal lives become entwined with the real events surrounding the marchers and their treatment in the capitol.  You’re not reading a novel to learn the history, but you will learn it and I think you will feel, as I did, that history is remarkably circular.

I think history has birthed a wonderful novelist.  The Lucky Dime website tells us that Georgia is hard at work on two new novels, a prequel to The Bonus entitled An Ordinary Kid and a sequel, The Old Ladies.  These are books I will want to read.  I can’t resist making a plug for another novel, one that was actually written in the 1930s by a now almost forgotten writer, Thomas Boyd, In Time of Peace, a book I think should be read together with The Bonus to create a really powerful understanding of our own period through the lens of another.

Talking with Georgia was alot of fun for me since I liked her book so much.  I hope you will enjoy it as well.  And I am not alone in liking this book alot – The Bonus won first place in the highly competitive Mainstream/Literary Fiction category of the Writer’s Digest Self Published Book Awards.

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