In 1918, at the age of 11, Sanora Babb wrote an essay titled “How to Handle Men” for an English class at a grade school in what was Oklahoma Territory.
Until she died in 2005 in the Hollywood Hills, Babb had trouble handling the men in her life, beginning with her abusive, alcoholic father and with her Chinese American lover and later her husband, James Wong Howe, an Academy award-winning cinematographer. Interracial marriages were illegal in the Golden State until 1948, when the California Supreme Court ruled that the ban was unconstitutional.
For most of her life, Babb had troubles galore with her lovers and male literary friends, including Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, and William Saroyan and Ray Bradbury, who both championed her work.
Of course, men also had trouble handling Babb. Her friend, Genevieve Taggard, said, “You are not an easy wife for any man.” Babb confessed, “I cannot be contained in a relationship of two.” Monogamy wasn’t her cup of tea. In the late 1930s, she had heartbreaking troubles with John Steinbeck, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, and with Steinbeck’s Random House editor, Bennet Cerf.
After promising to publish Whose Names Are Unknown, Babb’s novel, Cerf changed his mind and withdrew his offer. The Grapes of Wrath became an instant bestseller. Cerf insisted that two books about the Dust Bowl, the Okies and the Depression of the 1930s were too many. Babb’s and Steinbeck’s novels are indeed similar and yet also very different.
A woman wronged by a literary husband (think D. H. Lawrence and Charmian Kittredge London) or by a friend or a lover—that’s an all-too-familiar story. However, Iris Jamahl Dunkle gives it a new twist in Riding Like the Wind, her biography of an underappreciated American author who followed a familiar political path that took her from anonymity on the prairies into turbulent 1930s Hollywood. (University of California Press, 2024; $26.55)
Cerf’s rejection of Babb’s novel devastated the author for years. Like her fictional characters, she too would be largely unknown. Rejection contributed to attempted suicide. Yet for decades, she wrote and published brilliant short stories, as well as an autobiography titled An Owl on Every Post, and taught writing at UCLA. Her Okie novel wasn’t published until 2004, a year before her death.
Dunkle is perhaps the perfect biographer to tell Babb’s story. A former Sonoma County poet laureate, a faculty member at UC Davis and the poetry director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, she focuses, in her essays and biographies, on neglected women writers who often lived in the shadow of famous men.
Her first biography explores the life and work of Charmian London, subtitled “Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer.” Jack London’s second wife and an author in her own right, Charmian London never wrote anything as popular as The Call of the Wild, though she assisted her husband as researcher, secretary and muse.
Besides her writing of biographies such as the one on Chamain London, Dunkle edits and publishes a reader-supported literary site titled “Finding Lost Voices”—all those voices belong to women. In September 2024, Jamal touted the career of Esther McCoy, a fiction writer and an architectural critic who, Dunkle says, “put Los Angeles on the map.”
What about Raymond Chandler, the author of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, who set his novels in and around Los Angeles and made the City of Angels synonymous with noir? Chandler apparently doesn’t count in Jamal’s worldview. Wrong gender. And besides, his was never a lost voice.
In her riveting, meticulously researched new biography, Dunkle traces the ups and downs of Babb’s life from Oklahoma to California, her political adventures in and out of the American Communist Party, along with a trip to the Soviet Union, plus her tangled relationships with her father, mother, sister and lover/ husband James Wong Howe. Babb’s friend, Meridel Le Sueur, another largely lost, left-wing American voice, urged her to write “shamelessly and nakedly.” Easier said than done.
Living shamelessly and nakedly apparently came more easily to Babb than writing in that vein, though she tossed off brilliant short stories. For years, long fiction eluded her, and she eluded it. Late in life, she published a memoir and the autobiographical novel The Lost Traveler, the title of which suggests her own wandering life. Ken Burns honored Babb in his documentary, The Dust Bowl.
Dunkle argues that Babb’s portrait of the Okies is superior to Steinbeck’s portrait. She insists when we read Babb’s work, “We get to see the West in her eyes, and we are richer.” Babb told a reporter that she was a “better writer” than Steinbeck and that “his book is not as realistic as mine.” Readers can decide for themselves which book is better, though to suggest that Whose Names Are Unknown is superior to The Grapes of Wrath sounds, well, like sour grapes.
It also seems unlikely that Steinbeck “ripped off” Babb. True, she handed him her notes on the Okies and later called that decision “naïve.” Scholars insist that Steinbeck did his own research and wasn’t indebted to Babb and her work. When one reads Dunkle’s captivating, emotionally-wrenching biography, they might remember that, as T. S. Eliot and Oscar Wilde both insisted, “Talent borrows, genius steals.” And remember, too, that the “lost voices” of men and women are around every corner.
