Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a mother who

The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

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2024-11-14 06:00:02

Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who spent his days playing semi-pro baseball and gambling. From the age she could walk, she was running errands for her parents’ bakery and, later, helping them raise crops until drought put their mortgaged farm out of business. She rarely had time for school (or even enjoyed easy access to one) and learned to read from pages of The Denver Post that were pasted to the crude walls of their dugout home in East Colorado. (Her father described the place as looking “like a grave.”)

Babb’s observations of rural poverty, particularly during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, would filter through the imaginations of millions of Americans in years to come—though indirectly and often without credit. Babb knew intimately of what she wrote. Even when her parents started making better money, and she worked hard enough to earn a rare scholarship to the University of Kansas, her first teaching job depressed her so deeply that she couldn’t keep it for long. She was often required to do janitorial work as well as run classes, and couldn’t bear to see children come to school as poorly clothed and fed as she had been at their age. By the time she moved to Los Angeles and found work as a radio and print journalist and screenwriter in the late 1920s, the Depression hit and she spent several months sleeping rough in Lafayette Park with other out-of-work writers.

The first few decades of her life were an endless round of desperate exigencies. When she finally started making a decent living, her passion for political causes took up even more of her time. She joined the John Reed Club, traveled throughout Europe and postrevolutionary Russia, and attended one of the first League of American Writers Congresses in New York City in the mid-1930s, driving there cross-country with Tillie Olsen and driving back again with Nelson Algren. In her twenties, she became the primary carer for her younger sister, who suffered from mental illness; and in later years, from 1971 to ’76, she cared for her husband, the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, after he suffered a major stroke. Whatever the decade, and whatever the year, it was rare for Babb to scrape up more than a few hours here and there to focus on the great stories, novels, and poems she had in her.

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