Sanora Babb
Sanora Babb, whose career as a poet spanned seventy years, was born on April 21, 1907, in Leavenworth, Kansas, and raised in Red Rock, in what was then the Oklahoma Territory. Her parents ran a bakery, while her father was also a professional gambler. Red Rock bordered the Otoe-Missouria Nation, and Babb often sought refuge with the Otoe-Missouria people, escaping the turbulence of her home. After her father sold the bakery, the family moved to a remote homestead in eastern Colorado, living in a dugout while farming broomcorn. Babb’s grandfather “Konkie,” who also lived in the dugout, taught her to appreciate the vast prairie landscapes and to read from issues of the Denver Post pasted to the dugout’s dirt walls. The time she spent on the high plains would have a profound impact on her writing throughout her career.
Babb did not attend school formally until she was almost eleven, when her family relocated to Elkhart, Kansas. There, she began working for local newspapers—a profession she would continue as the family moved frequently due to her father’s gambling. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school, though she was denied the honor due to protests from parents who objected to honoring the daughter of a gambler. Undeterred, Babb pursued higher education on a scholarship at the University of Kansas before transferring to Garden City Community College, where she earned an associate’s degree and a teaching certificate. A voracious reader from a young age, she built a small library through the Little Blue Book editions of literary classics that she bought at drugstores.
When Babb first encountered the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, it was a revelation. Millay’s candid exploration of sexuality from a position of agency gave Babb a model for living her life—not just as a poet, but as a woman free from the societal constraints that limited most women’s lives at the time. While teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in New Hope, Kansas, she began submitting her poetry for publication. One of her first poems, “To L_________,” appeared in Ben Haglund’s magazine Northern Light. Her early work was published in the journals The Harp, The Prism, Jayhawk, Will o’ the Wisp, Stratford Magazine, The Lantern, Poet’s Scroll, and in the anthology The Grub Street Book of Verse, edited and published by Henry Harrison in 1930. Two years earlier, Babb was dubbed the “Kansas Poetess” and was hailed as “one of the poetic geniuses of the country” in a column in the Kansas City Star, which was syndicated nationwide. She wrote short, lyrical, often metrical poems focusing on themes of love and her sense of place.
In 1929, Babb moved to Los Angeles, where she would live for most of her life. There, she used her Associated Press credentials to get journalism jobs and met a community of young writers through organizations such as the League of American Writers. In 1935, she was chosen as the Los Angeles delegate (along with writers and activists Harry Carlisle and Tillie Olsen) for the First American Writers Congress. While in Los Angeles, Babb formed relationships with notable figures such as Academy Award-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe and writers Ralph Ellison and William Saroyan while continuing to seek success as a writer of longer works. However, the publication of her novel was canceled by Random House when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath became a commercial success. Whose Names Are Unknown was published in 2004 and is only now beginning to gain recognition.
During the 1930s, Babb published award-winning short fiction and went on to write another novel, The Lost Traveler (Reynal, 1958), as well as a memoir, An Owl on Every Post (McCall, 1970). She continued to write and submit poems throughout her career, which appeared in various publications, including The Prairie Schooner, The Dalhousie Review, Southern Review, and Hawaii Review. Her first poetry collection, Told in the Seed, was published by West End Press in 1998 when Babb was ninety-one.
According to her biographer, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Babb’s long career offers a unique perspective on the changes in American poetry over her lifetime and how political events directly affected whose work would be remembered. Her early lyric poems, influenced by the New Woman movement, gave way in the 1930s to imagistic poems that recall the work of Ezra Pound. Beginning in the 1950s, when she wrote her novel The Lost Traveler, based on her family’s experiences, Dunkle observes how Babb’s poetry turned back to documenting her life growing up in poverty on the plains, often giving agency to the women she depicted. In the poem “Snapshots,” Babb gives us a portrait of her mother returning from visiting relatives in Kansas City, dressed in a “chic” suit, only to be transformed back to the mundane by the “housewifery” that “makes her plain” when she puts on her “apron and flat-heeled slippers.”
Due to Babb’s affiliations with the Left, when the Red Scare occurred, she and her husband, James Wong Howe, were subjected to relentless FBI interviews. To escape the scrutiny and avoid being called to testify, she fled to Mexico City, where she lived for several years. By the time the second wave of feminism began to recover the voices of writers erased during that period, Babb was focused on caring for her ailing husband. Dunkle posits that this may explain why Babb’s first poetry collection was not published until 1998. Babb died on December 31, 2005, at her home in the Hollywood Hills.