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

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

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

Lee Klancher: The Farmall Century 1923-2023

April 24, 2024 by  
Filed under Art and Photography, Non-Fiction, WritersCast

The Farmall Century 1923-2023: The Evolution of Red Tractors and Crawlers in the Golden Age of International Harvester – Lee Klancher – Octane Press – Hardcover – 9781642341393 – 384 pages (11.8 x 10.5) – $59.95 – October 26, 2023

This fantastic coffee table book is a massive, well-researched, detailed, extensively illustrated, and very readable history not only of the International Harvester Farmall tractor, but of the people and company that built, marketed and sold it all over the world. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in tractors as motorized, wheeled devices, this story is compelling. Farming was once what the majority of Americans did for a living, and while the numbers of farmers has declined steadily during the last hundred years, the industries that emerged in the industrial age to convert American agriculture from horse to engine driven agriculture were a crucial part of the story of modern America and the world we fed (and still, to some measure still feed).

As a history of an important part of our agro-industrial economy, The Farmall Century is indispensable. If you are interested in American history, this book will captivate your imagination and make you think about the incredible ambition, ingenuity, inventiveness, and commitment of so many individuals who built these industrial companies, and you will also find reasons to think about the downsides of our industrialized agriculture too.

Lee Klancher probably knows more about tractors and farmers than anyone you will ever come across. He not only writes and takes photographs for his books, he is also the founder and operator of the leading tractor related book publisher, Octane Press, in Austin, Texas. I interviewed him about Octane for the Publishing Talks series back in 2016 because I think the kind of focused niche publishing he does is so interesting.

In any case, I love anything with wheels, and even though I did not grow up on a farm and have never driven a tractor, I had a great time reading Lee’s beautifully written and produced Farmall book. Talking to Lee about it was an additional pleasure. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Here’s a link to the book, and here’s a link to Octane Press, which is a fun site to visit also. There are plenty of tractor books there, but much more too, a great many treats, especially if you like wheeled vehicles.

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt

March 18, 2021 by  
Filed under Non-Fiction, WritersCast

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory – Claudio Saunt – 97800393541564 – paperback – W.W. Norton – 416 pages – $26.95 – February 23, 2021 – ebook versions available at lower prices

This is a book that should be required reading for all Americans. Even those of us who think we know the story of the Trail of Tears and other important efforts by our white antecedents to eliminate Indians from the eastern United States will learn from the incredibly well researched and carefully documented story told by a brilliant historian.

Unworthy Republic documents the reprehensible story of the “Indian Removal” of the 1830s, which resulted in the forced migration of Native Americans whose ancestral territories include what is now North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, and to a lesser extent Ohio and western New York state.

On May 28, 1830, the United States Congress authorized the forced expulsion of indigenous people then living in the east to a new Indian territory west of the Mississippi, under the false notion that they would be free to live their lives away from white settlers and farmers then pouring into their unceded lands.

The US government then set out to forcibly move at least 80,000 Native Americans from their homelands west, usually on foot, and always at their own expense. It was a disastrous undertaking that was shot through with fraud and a racist disregard for the health and well being of the Indians by the white citizenry and politicians who wanted to steal their land, as well as by the military that was used to administer and enforce the effort.

As Saunt exhaustively documents, fraud, intimidation, murder and theft were the common tools of the day. Rich planters and politicians created a fictional hypocritical story line to justify their greed and theft. In the course of the removals, many thousands of Native Americans were killed, many more suffered horribly, and almost all lost their lands and what few possessions they had at the time. In the end, the “removal” can be seen for what it was, an unofficial US policy of extermination constructed to benefit southern slave owning planters with the active participation and support of greedy financial speculators, mostly from New York.

In this book, Saunt makes three related core arguments: “The state-administered mass expulsion of indigenous people was unprecedented, it was a turning point for indigenous peoples and for the United States, and it was far from inevitable.”

It is impossible to read this book and to not be angered, even now that we are almost two hundred years removed from this decade of horror. The actual events that underpin the history ofd the United States must be reconciled with the manufactured myths that we use to tell our own stories to ourselves. It is not a matter only of white guilt (though there is nothing wrong, in my opinion, with guilt, if it can be harnessed to positive ends) nor is an intellectual hand wringing a useful response to learning the hard lessons of our history. What we can take from these stories is an understanding of how to be better at living our ideals, and transforming what we have been to something different, that gives voice to the actual people whose land we live on today. The acknowledgment of indigenous people can not be simply gestural. A book like Unworthy Republic must draw us closer to action – as Buddhists often point out – no one is free until all are free. The American correlation is that no one can live comfortably with the land until all of us do. Our history is with us still.

Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize
Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2020

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of award-winning books, including A New Order of Things; Black, White, and Indian; and West of the Revolution. He lives in Athens, Georgia. It was an honor for me to have the opportunity to speak with Claudio about this important and powerful book.

Author website here.

Buy the book here.

Crooked Hallelujah: Kelli Jo Ford

July 20, 2020 by  
Filed under Fiction, WritersCast

Crooked Hallelujah – Kelli Jo Ford – 978-0-8021-4912-1 – Grove Press – Hardcover – 304 pages – July 14, 2020 – $26.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Kelli Jo Ford’s novel is a deeply rewarding read. Comparisons to the work of Louise Erdrich are inevitable and unavoidable (and Kelli Jo mentioned Louise in our conversation as one of her most important influences.) This is a novel of relationships and family told through the voices of four generations of Cherokee women and to a lesser extent, the men who come in and out of their lives. The narrative weaves together strands of familial cloth into what emerges as a beautiful and compelling pattern that we experience fully as the story is told.

At the outset of the book, we are in 1974 in the Cherokee Nation, eastern Oklahoma, where fifteen-year-old Justine is growing up in a family dominated by women – her mother, Lula, and her mother’s mother, Granny. We follow Justine, and her daughter, Reney, through a series of challenges in Oklahoma and Texas and back to Oklahoma, where family and roots call out to her.

Kelli Jo Ford is a fine writer, and manages her characters and their stories well. Her intergenerational story is complicated, and the multiple narrative voices take some concentration to follow, but her writing is warm and deft, and we are rewarded in the end by the beauty and depth of her characters and their lives. This family of strong Cherokee women continually face challenges with strength and wisdom. They make the necessary sacrifices for the people in their lives and go on living despite all the difficulties they face. They don’t always get along – these women are real people, not caricatures. They do not always succeed in understanding each other or overcoming the difficulties and challenges they face. There are conflicts over religion and individuality. But these women are bound by blood, heart, and a deeply felt love that carries them forward despite all. I came away from this book with an appreciation for the strength and perceptiveness of Cherokee women.

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing published by Harper in 2012. She now lives in Virginia with her husband, poet Scott Weaver.

My conversation with Kelli Jo was her first interview about Crooked Hallelujah. She is a new writer many of us will want to follow in the years to come.

Author website here.

Support local business. Buy the book from R.J. Julia Booksellers.