Sanora Babb - Life

Life

Sanora Babb was born in Otoe territory in what is now Oklahoma, though neither her mother nor father was Otoe. Her father, Walter, a professional gambler, moved Sonora and her sister Dorothy to a one room dugout on a broomcorn farm settled by her grandfather near Lamar, Colorado.

Her experiences were fictionalized in her novels An Owl on Every Post and The Lost Traveler. Though she did not attend school until she was 11, she managed to graduate from high school as valedictorian. She began studying at the University of Kansas but she could not afford to continue there and after one year transferred to the Junior College in Garden City, Kansas. Her first work in journalism was with the Garden City Herald, and several of her articles were reprinted by the Associated Press. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to work for the Los Angeles Times, but due to the U.S. stock market crash of 1929 the newspaper retracted its offer. She was occasionally homeless through the Depression, sleeping in Lafayette Park. She eventually found secretarial work with Warner Brothers and wrote scripts for radio station KFWB. She joined the John Reed Club and was a member of the US Communist Party for 11 years, visiting the Soviet Union in 1936, but she dropped out of the party due to the authoritarian structure and in-fighting.

In 1938 she returned to California to work for the Farm Security Administration. While with FSA, she kept detailed notes on the tent camps of the Dust Bowl migrants to California, that were loaned to John Steinbeck by her supervisor Tom Collins. She turned the stories she collected into her novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Bennett Cerf planned to publish the novel with Random House, but the appearance of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath caused publication to be shelved in 1939. Her novel didn't get published until 2004.

Babb had a long friendship with William Saroyan starting in 1932 that grew into an unrequited love affair on Saroyan's part. She also had as an affair with Ralph Ellison.

She met her future husband, the Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized in California. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building. When the state supreme court overturned California's anti-miscegenation law (which prohibited marriage between people of different races), it took them three days to find a judge who would agree to marry them. Even then, the judge reportedly remarked, "She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a chink, that's her business." Due to the ban, Howe's studio contract "morals clause" prohibited him from publicly acknowledging their marriage.

In the early 1940s Babb was West Coast secretary of the League of American Writers. She edited the literary magazine The Clipper and its successor The California Quarterly, helping to introduce the work of Ray Bradbury and B. Traven, as well as running a Chinese restaurant owned by Howe.

During the early years of the HUAC hearings, Babb was blacklisted, and moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from further harassment.