{"title":"Sanora Babb","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"whose-names-are-unknown-book-sanora-babb-9780806135793","title":"Whose Names Are Unknown","description":"Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel \u003ci\u003eWhose Names Are Unknown\u003c\/i\u003e tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author's firsthand experience. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt's father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The Duanne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless Okies and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can't possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Babb wrote \u003ci\u003eWhose Names are Unknown\u003c\/i\u003e in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this exceptionally fine novel but when John Steinbeck's \u003ci\u003eThe Grapes of Wrath\u003c\/i\u003e swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those whose names are unknown. In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49506993570065,"sku":"CIN0806135794G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806135794.jpg?v=1751265030"},{"product_id":"whose-names-are-unknown-book-sanora-babb-9780806137124","title":"Whose Names Are Unknown","description":"Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based on the author's firsthand experience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49550211252497,"sku":"GOR004278771","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49709407207697,"sku":"CIN0806137126G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737813328145,"sku":"NGR9780806137124","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49934008549649,"sku":"CIN0806137126VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007592890641,"sku":"NIN9780806137124","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51456289767697,"sku":"GOR011808971","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806137126.jpg?v=1767354781"},{"product_id":"lost-traveler-book-sanora-babb-9780985991517","title":"The Lost Traveler","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn autobiographical novel, long out of print, continues Sanora Babb's story as begun in her memoir, An Owl on Every Post. Set in Kansas in the early 1930s, it is a rich character study of a classic American individualist and his family. The father, a complex and magnetic man, is portrayed from the perspective of his brave and proud daughter, Robin. Against the dark background of his declining fortunes stand Robin's high spirits and intelligence as she experiences the turbulent emotions of first sexual love and rebels against the circumstances of the gambler's rambling life. The novel's depiction of the Great Depression era and its lost families is one that will haunt readers long after the final page. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe author's first book manuscript was her Dust Bowl novel Whose Names Are Unknown, which Random House didn't publish because The Grapes of Wrath came out first. Thus, The Lost Traveler, published in 1958, was her first published, and well-received, novel. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is a good deal of laughter in The Lost Traveler. There is a good deal of tragedy in it, too, for Miss Babb has given us a living and unflinchingly honest picture of a wandering gambler and his family. This is her first novel and she shows herself to be a searching storyteller. New York Times \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStrongly recommended. A fascinating story of a professional nomadic gambler who starts by being a hero in the eyes of his wife and daughters and ends in lonely disgrace: occasionally embarrassing, frequently funny, and as an account of the development of family relationships good by any standards.London Sunday Times \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e. . . a remarkable job of making the hero sympathetic and understandable in spite of his occupation and occasional brutality.  The author] has made the whole family come alive, particularly Robin, the only member of the family with fortitude enough to stand up to her father. Los Angeles Mirror News\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50015318606097,"sku":"CIN0985991518G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010772730129,"sku":"NIN9780985991517","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51228285370641,"sku":"GOR010082624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0985991518.jpg?v=1751172128"},{"product_id":"owl-on-every-post-book-sanora-babb-9780985991500","title":"An Owl on Every Post","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis manuscript sets out a process for estimating fatalities in collapsed buildings due to ground shaking in an earthquake. The aim of this research is to supplement current earthquake loss estimation with fatality rates (percentage of occupants killed) for use in models which are based on recent empirical information on deaths from earthquakes. This document specifically explores the lethality potential to occupants of collapsed structures. Whilst earthquake casualty modeling has admittedly suffered from a lack of post-earthquake collection of data and rigour in assessing these data, recent earthquakes such as 2008 Wenchuan (China) and 2011 Christchurch (New Zealand) have brought to light some important findings. Under the auspices of US Geological Survey's PAGER, empirical fatality data related to collapses of buildings from significant earthquakes in the past 40 years have been thoroughly examined. Through detailed investigations of fatal building collapses and the volume reductions within these buildings, important clues related to the lethality potential of different failure mechanisms of global modern and older construction types were found. The gathered evidence forms the basis of the derivation of a set of fatality rates for use in loss models. The set of judgment-based rates are for 31 global building types. This significant advancement in casualty modeling, the resolutions and quality of available data, the important assumptions made, and the final derivation of fatality rates are discussed here. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis document contributes to global efforts to develop a way of estimating probable earthquake fatalities very rapidly after an earthquake has taken place. The fatality rates proposed here can be incorporated directly into earthquake loss estimation models where fatalities are derived from collapses of different types of buildings. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50141123608849,"sku":"CIN098599150XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50180268196113,"sku":"CIN098599150XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010539618577,"sku":"NIN9780985991500","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53595099595025,"sku":"GOR008216357","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/098599150X.jpg?v=1751235484"},{"product_id":"dark-earth-and-selected-prose-from-the-great-depression-book-sanora-babb-9780985991579","title":"The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50157818478865,"sku":"GOR012580341","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010834858257,"sku":"NIN9780985991579","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0985991577.jpg?v=1750884865"},{"product_id":"on-the-dirty-plate-trail-book-sanora-babb-9780292721449","title":"On the Dirty Plate Trail","description":"Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008  The 1930s exodus of \"Okies\" dispossessed by repeated droughts and failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work risked sublimating the subjects—real people and actual experience—into aesthetic artifacts, icons of suffering, deprivation, and despair. Working for the Farm Security Administration in California's migrant labor camps in 1938-39, Sanora Babb, a young journalist and short story writer, together with her sister Dorothy, a gifted amateur photographer, entered the intimacy of the dispossessed farmers' lives as insiders, evidenced in the immediacy and accuracy of their writings and photos. Born in Oklahoma and raised on a dryland farm, the Babb sisters had unparalleled access to the day-by-day harsh reality of field labor and family life.  This book presents a vivid, firsthand account of the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrant labor camps, and the growth of labor activism among Anglo and Mexican farm workers in California's agricultural valleys linked by the \"Dirty Plate Trail\" (Highway 99). It draws upon the detailed field notes that Sanora Babb wrote while in the camps, as well as on published articles and short stories about the migrant workers and an excerpt from her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Like Sanora's writing, Dorothy's photos reveal an unmediated, personal encounter with the migrants, portraying the social and emotional realities of their actual living and working conditions, together with their efforts to organize and to seek temporary recreation. An authority in working-class literature and history, volume editor Douglas Wixson places the Babb sisters' work in relevant historical and social-political contexts, examining their role in reconfiguring the Dust Bowl exodus as a site of memory in the national consciousness.  Focusing on the material conditions of everyday existence among the Dust Bowl refugees, the words and images of these two perceptive young women clearly show that, contrary to stereotype, the \"Okies\" were a widely diverse people, including not only Steinbeck's sharecropper \"Joads\" but also literate, independent farmers who, in the democracy of the FSA camps, found effective ways to rebuild lives and create communities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346801037585,"sku":"CIN0292721447G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51606517776657,"sku":"CIN0292721447VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0292721447.jpg?v=1763222346"},{"product_id":"told-in-the-seed-and-selected-poems-book-sanora-babb-9780985991548","title":"Told in the Seed and Selected Poems","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50823065501969,"sku":"CIN0985991542G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010814509329,"sku":"NIN9780985991548","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52815558836497,"sku":"CIN0985991542A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0985991542.jpg?v=1751298811"},{"product_id":"cry-of-the-tinamou-book-sanora-babb-9780985991555","title":"Cry of the Tinamou","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe short stories in this collection range across cultures and settings from the Great Plains to California, from Los Angeles' Chinatown to the Central American jungle. In them, Sanora Babb vividly conveys a powerful sense of place. She gives us complex and memorable protagonists, often female, who struggle to control their fate. All are depicted with Babb's characteristic empathy for outsiders and the marginalized.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis empathy, the foundation of Babb's moral and social consciousness, arises from her life experiences: an impoverished and itinerant childhood in dryland Oklahoma Territory, Kansas and Colorado; a period of unemployment and homelessness in Los Angeles at the start of the Great Depression; her New Deal-ere work with labor organizers, migrant farm workers, and displaced persons; and her involvement with a vibrant artistic and literary community that included, in addition to her husband the cinematographer James Wong Howe, William Saroyan, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Carlos Bulosan. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn her art, as in her life, Babb was transgressive, defying, as Alan Wald writes in his introduction, the constraining customs of her . . . country. Her fiction is a gift to her readers, a gesture of solidarity across cultures expressing her sympathetic recognition of the slow and painful process of human self-emancipation. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll but one of the stories in this collection were previously published in literary journals and popular magazines as varied as \u003cem\u003eAntioch Review\u003c\/em\u003eand \u003cem\u003eSaturday Evening Post\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eCalifornia Quarterly\u003c\/em\u003eand \u003cem\u003eYellow Silk\u003c\/em\u003e. The Santa Anna and The Wild Flower have been widely anthologized. The title story Cry of the Tinamou first appeared in this collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51010624815377,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010628026641,"sku":"NIN9780985991555","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0985991550.jpg?v=1751109859"},{"product_id":"an-owl-on-every-post-book-sanora-babb-9780841500372","title":"An Owl on Every Post","description":"\u003cp\u003eSanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugout's dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably \u003cem\u003eWhose Names Are Unknown.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe author was seven when her parents began to homestead an isolated 320-acre farm on the western plains. She tells the story through her eyes as a sensitive, fearless young girl who came to love the wind, the vastness, the mystery and magic in the ordinary. \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis evocative memoir of a pioneer childhood on the Great Plains is written with the lyricism and sensitivity that distinguishes all of Sanora Babb's writing. \u003cem\u003eAn Owl on Every Post\u003c\/em\u003e, with its environmental disasters, extreme weather, mortgage foreclosures, and harsh living conditions, resonates as much today as when it first appeared. What this true story of Sanora's prairie childhood reveals best are the values courage, pride, determination, and love that allowed her family to prevail over total despair. \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis long, out-of-print memoir is reissued with new acclaim: \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOn a par stylistically and thematically with Willa Cather's \u003cem\u003eMy Antonia\u003c\/em\u003e, this is a classic that deserves to be rediscovered and cherished for years to come. Linda Miller, English Professor at Penn State and chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board for \u003cem\u003eThe Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAn unsung masterpiece in the field of American autobiography I was completely blown away. This memoir offers an unforgettable picture of pioneer life. Her ageless story deserves a permanent place in our nation's literature. Arnold Rampersad, author of \u003cem\u003eRalph Ellison: A Biography.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSanora Babb is the author of five books, as well as numerous essays, short stories, and poems that were published in literary magazines alongside the work of William Saroyan, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Carlos Williams. Her Dust Bowl novel, \u003cem\u003eWhose Names Are Unknown\u003c\/em\u003e, was recently featured in the Ken Burns documentary on The Dust Bowl.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEditorial Reviews\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A wry, affectionate but unsentimental recall of frontiering struggles in Colorado just prior to WWI. \u003cem\u003eKirkus\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMasterly. Hers is a small song, and not grand opera. But hearing it is a significant and salutary experience. \u003cem\u003eLondon Times\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe author has achieved a small miracle with this book for she has turned hunger, poverty, loneliness and depression into incomparable beauty by the magic of her writing. \u003cem\u003eThe Pretoria News\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e Babb's engaging memoir recalls a childhood spent on the harsh and wild Colorado frontier during the early 1900s. \u003cem\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOwl is novelist Babb's memories of her childhood in eastern Colorado and Kansas before World War I. LJ's reviewer found that Babb wrote well, relating vividly and with fine and fond recollection \u003cem\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/em\u003e 12\/1\/70.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53402842661137,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53402843808017,"sku":"CIN0841500371G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780841500372.jpg?v=1776121388"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-sanora-babb.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}