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

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.

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