Bøger af Sanora Babb

Written during and of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression era, from personal experience, Babb evokes a strong sense of place, complex family relationships, and a strong environmental or eco-feminist sensibility.

Told in the Seed and Selected Poems offers poems from Sanora Babb's more than sixty years of writing and publishing poetry. This new collection adds many of her earliest poems to those of her later years that were in the original Told in the Seed. A new introduction by Carol S. Loranger notes that "Of all Sanora Babb's writings, it is the poetry, perhaps, that offers the most intimate and unvarnished picture of the woman and the artist." In the introduction Loranger weaves together relevant information about Babb's life with the more personal poems to further enhance the reader's appreciation. Babb published her first poem at fourteen in the Forgan Eagle and continued to write and publish poetry from the 1920s to the early 1990s in a wide range of journals and publications. She won the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 for "Told in the Seed" and the Gold Medal Award in 1932 for "Captive" from the Mitre Press Anthology, London.Having a strong empathy with people and their daily lives, an affinity with all in the natural world, and the ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary, Babb reflects all this in her poetry. Her poems quicken with lyricism, clarity, and a powerful sense of immediacy.

The short stories in this collection range across cultures and settings from the Great Plains to California, from Los Angeles' Chinatown to the Central American jungle. In them, Sanora Babb vividly conveys a powerful sense of place. She gives us complex and memorable protagonists, often female, who struggle to control their fate. All are depicted with Babb's characteristic empathy for outsiders and the marginalized.This empathy, the foundation of Babb's moral and social consciousness, arises from her life experiences: an impoverished and itinerant childhood in dryland Oklahoma Territory, Kansas and Colorado; a period of unemployment and homelessness in Los Angeles at the start of the Great Depression; her New Deal-ere work with labor organizers, migrant farm workers, and displaced persons; and her involvement with a vibrant artistic and literary community that included, in addition to her husband the cinematographer James Wong Howe, William Saroyan, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Carlos Bulosan. In her art, as in her life, Babb was transgressive, defying, as Alan Wald writes in his introduction, "the constraining customs of her . . . country." Her fiction is "a gift to her readers, a gesture of solidarity across cultures expressing her sympathetic recognition of the slow and painful process of human self-emancipation." All but one of the stories in this collection were previously published in literary journals and popular magazines as varied as Antioch Reviewand Saturday Evening Post, California Quarterlyand Yellow Silk. "The Santa Anna" and "The Wild Flower" have been widely anthologized. The title story "Cry of the Tinamou" first appeared in this collection.

Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based on the author's firsthand experience.

A vivid, firsthand account of the migrations, immigrant camps, and labor organizing of displaced Midwestern farmers during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, illustrated with striking photographs.

An autobiographical novel, long out of print, continues Sanora Babb's story as begun in her memoir, An Owl on Every Post. Set in Kansas in the early 1930s, it is a rich character study of a classic American individualist and his family. The father, a complex and magnetic man, is portrayed from the perspective of his brave and proud daughter, Robin. Against the dark background of his declining fortunes stand Robin's high spirits and intelligence as she experiences the turbulent emotions of first sexual love and rebels against the circumstances of the gambler's rambling life. The novel's depiction of the Great Depression era and its lost families is one that will haunt readers long after the final page. The author's first book manuscript was her Dust Bowl novel Whose Names Are Unknown, which Random House didn't publish because The Grapes of Wrath came out first. Thus, The Lost Traveler, published in 1958, was her first published, and well-received, novel. "There is a good deal of laughter in The Lost Traveler. There is a good deal of tragedy in it, too, for Miss Babb has given us a living and unflinchingly honest picture of a wandering gambler and his family. This is her first novel and she shows herself to be a searching storyteller." New York Times "Strongly recommended. A fascinating story of a professional nomadic gambler who starts by being a hero in the eyes of his wife and daughters and ends in lonely disgrace: occasionally embarrassing, frequently funny, and as an account of the development of family relationships good by any standards."London Sunday Times ". . . a remarkable job of making the hero sympathetic and understandable in spite of his occupation and occasional brutality. [The author] has made the whole family come alive, particularly Robin, the only member of the family with fortitude enough to stand up to her father." Los Angeles Mirror News

Sanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugout’s dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably Whose Names Are Unknown.The author was seven when her parents began to homestead an isolated 320-acre farm on the western plains. She tells the story through her eyes as a sensitive, fearless young girl who came to love the wind, the vastness, the mystery and magic in the ordinary. This evocative memoir of a pioneer childhood on the Great Plains is written with the lyricism and sensitivity that distinguishes all of Sanora Babb’s writing. An Owl on Every Post, with its environmental disasters, extreme weather, mortgage foreclosures, and harsh living conditions, resonates as much today as when it first appeared. What this true story of Sanora’s prairie childhood reveals best are the valuesΓÇöcourage, pride, determination, and loveΓÇöthat allowed her family to prevail over total despair. This long, out-of-print memoir is reissued with new acclaim:“On a par stylistically and thematically with Willa Cather’s My Antonia, this is a classic that deserves to be rediscovered and cherished for years to come.”ΓÇöLinda Miller, English Professor at Penn State and chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board for The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway.“An unsung masterpiece in the field of American autobiographyΓÇöI was completely blown away. This memoir offers an unforgettable picture of pioneer life. Her ageless story deserves a permanent place in our nation’s literature.ΓÇöArnold Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison: A Biography. About the AuthorSanora Babb is the author of five books, as well as numerous essays, short stories, and poems that were published in literary magazines alongside the work of William Saroyan, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Carlos Williams. Her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was recently featured in the Ken Burns documentary on The Dust Bowl.Editorial Reviews "A wry, affectionate but unsentimental recall of frontiering struggles in Colorado just prior to WWI." ΓÇô Kirkus“Masterly. Hers is a small song, and not grand opera. But hearing it is a significant and salutary experience.”ΓÇöLondon Times“The author has achieved a small miracle with this book for she has turned hunger, poverty, loneliness and depression into incomparable beauty by the magic of her writing.” ΓÇô The Pretoria News “Babb''s engaging memoir recalls a childhood spent on the harsh and wild Colorado frontier during the early 1900s.”ΓÇöPublishers WeeklyOwl is novelist Babb''s memories of her childhood in eastern Colorado and Kansas before World War I. LJ''s reviewer found that Babb wrote well, "relating vividly and with fine and fond recollection" Library Journal 12/1/70.