Sanora Babb and Tom Kromer: Depression Fiction, Collective and Individual, by Two Writers Who Were Homeless

The publication history of Whose Names Are Unknown, by Sanora Babb (1907–2005), is one of the most extraordinary publishing stories in literary history. And the book itself deserves to be far more widely acknowledged as a literary classic.

Babb’s life story is remarkable enough. She was largely raised in a tiny Otoe-Missouria community in Oklahoma; the family also lived for periods of time in a dugout home on a failing Colorado farm that had been established by Babb’s grandfather, and in Elkhart, Kansas, before moving back to Oklahoma. Babb received no formal schooling before the age of 11, but in the year she graduated she was chosen as the class valedictorian at the high school in Forgan, Oklahoma (though the award was never given to her, after some parents protested, saying the daughter of an inveterate gambler should not receive such an honor). She enrolled at the University of Kansas, but did not have sufficient funds to complete a post secondary education. She worked in Kansas as a journalist, worked in Los Angeles as a secretary at Warner Brothers, wrote a few radio scripts, and spent some time homeless as well.

In 1938 Babb spent eight months volunteering with the federal government’s Farm Security Administration; the FSA was working to set up camps for California’s vast population of itinerant workers, most of them migrants from other parts of the country who had been forced by Depression-era conditions to leave their homes. Babb kept a diary and—at the suggestion of the manager of one of the farm labor camps, Tom Collins—she also began to keep detailed field notes as she travelled from camp to camp and spoke to the workers and their families about their lives. She drew both on the diary and on the field notes as she began to write a novel, several chapters of which she submitted to Random House early in 1939; they were received with enthusiasm by senior editor (and company co-founder) Bennett Cerf, who sent Babb a check and suggested she come to New York to finish the novel. Cerf remained enthusiastic when she submitted the completed manuscript in July, calling it “exceptionally fine.”

As it happened, though, another writer—John Steinbeck—had been working at the same time as Babb, in the same area, on a novel with a similar theme; it is now known that Collins, without asking Babb’s permission, had provided Steinbeck with a copy of Babb’s notes, and that Steinbeck drew on them heavily in writing what would become one of the decade’s most successful novels, The Grapes of Wrath (published by Viking in April 1939). “What rotten luck,” Cerf wrote to Babb in August of 1939, that another novel “should have so swept the country. Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax.”

Although Cerf provided Babb with an advance on another novel, plans to publish Whose Names Are Unknown were cancelled, and when Babb submitted the novel to several other major publishers, it was rejected by all of them. It was not until 1958 that Babb published a book about the Depression years (the autobiographical novel The Lost Traveller), and not until 2004, a year before she died, that the University of Oklahoma Press finally published Whose Names Are Unknown.

The appearance of Babb’s novel sparked re-assessments of Steinbeck’s work, and also prompted a number of critics and literary historians to argue that Whose Names Are Unknown may well have grounds to be considered a better book than The Grapes of Wrath (even setting the issue of appropriation entirely to one side). For “those who have read both books,” suggested Mike Conklin in the Chicago Tribune in October of 2004, Babb’s novel is the better of the two—“leaner, faster paced, and full of details that give a more insightful look at a tragic time in American history.”

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath focuses largely on the Joad family as they are forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma, travel to California to seek a better life, and find new hardships there as migrant laborers; Babb’s Whose Lives Are Unknown focuses largely on the Dunne family as they are forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma, travel to California to seek a better life, and find new hardships there as migrant laborers. But Steinbeck focuses far more than does Babb on a single individual; Tom Joad is very much at the center of the story. In Babb’s novel, on the other hand, the various members of the Dunne family are focused on roughly equally—and the novel frequently adopts a “bird’s eye view” of an entire community as a whole. In the following passages, for example, the operative pronoun is “they,” and it refers not to the Dunne family but to the entire community of migrant farm workers:

They moved on again, into August and September, into Butte County and peaches.

Some of the camps spread their ragtowns along the banks of the Feather River, among the cottonwoods, poplars, and live oaks. Here was the chance to make some money, to be sure of winter. No matter how much they pinched and saved, there was not much money left, perhaps none, when the fruit was picked and they had to move on.

Much more than The Grapes of Wrath—-and, arguably, more than any other American novel,* Whose Lives Are Unknown tells a collective story, not an individual one. And to my mind at least, it tells it extraordinarily well, in plain but vivid and sonorous prose. A good case can be made that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath deserves to be less well known. An even better case can be made that Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown deserves to be far better known.

I'll mention as well one other little-known novel of the Depression--Waiting for Nothing,** an extraordinary 1935 autobiographical novel by Tom Kromer. Kromer was one of the millions in the 1930s who were homeless and hungry and desperate--so desperate in his case that, as he describes, he at one point came very close to attempting armed robbery. Waiting for Nothing is a book of vignettes, really, but every one of them strikes home powerfully--the boy who becomes horribly injured trying to hop a freight train, the streetwalker who Kromer teaches how to get stale bread, the starving mother who abandons her starving baby. Throughout, there is Kromer's endless struggle to find "hots" and "a flop"--hot food and a place to sleep.

Kromer rode the rails across the country. He eventually wrote Waiting for Nothing while staying at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in California--another sort of camp set up by the US government in the Depression, and just as helpful as those set up by the FSA for migrant farm workers.

Kromer's book is not collective writing in the same sense as Whose Names Are Unknown is a collective novel; Kromer's first-person narrative voice remains a powerful presence throughout. But in its way it's arguably just as effective as Babb's novel in giving the reader a sense of the lives of a wide range of people caught up in desperate circumstances. Just as effective too in making the case that those of us who aren't desperate should give, and give generously, to those who are truly in need.

*Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which tells the story of workers in c. 1900 Chicago slaughterhouses, is an obvious point of comparison; Sinclair’s novel does focus largely on collective issues, but throughout the book the character of Jurgis remains at the center of the narrative.

**My thanks to John Marsh for drawing my attention to Kromer's novel.

Family who traveled by freight train, Yakima Valley, 1939. Photo taken by Dorothea Lange. (Farm Security Administration)