Riding Like the Wind: the Life of Sanora Babb
By Iris Jamahl Dunkle
This biography resurrects the groundbreaking life and voice of Sanora Babb
In 1939, when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation’s collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing gifted writer Sanora Babb, who was more intimately connected to the true experience of Dust Bowl migrants.
No novelist captured the relentless devastation of the Dust Bowl, or the cruel treatment of the desperate “Okies” forced to leave their homes on the plains for California, better than Sanora Babb. In this biography, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle explains why. Riding Like the Wind brings to vivid life an important American writer who never received the critical acclaim and commercial success she deserved.
Jamahl Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. Here, she befriended the era’s literati including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison, entered into an illegal marriage, and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb’s field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. Bu this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; despite betrayals by Steinbeck and by Babb’s own publisher, Babb went on to produce writing that had a profound impact. Riding Like the Wind remind us that the stories we know – and who tells them – can change the way we remember history.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning biographer, essayist, and poet. Her previous titles include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer and the poetry collection West: Fire: Archive.
