Positivity: Author Earns Long-Overdue Recognition of Her Work a Year Before Her Death

Sanora Babb died on Dec. 31. This is a Positivity post because of what she lived to see roughly a year before that — Her 1938 novel finally got the recognition it obviously had deserved for so long:

Acclaimed writer Sanora Babb dead at 98

HOLLYWOOD – If there were lessons to be learned from Sanora Babb’s hardscrabble years as a child on the Colorado frontier, one of them must have been perseverance.

Babb waited 65 years in the shadow of a literary giant for her first completed novel to be published. Upstaged in 1938 by John Steinbeck’s bestselling “The Grapes of Wrath,” Babb’s tale about the travails of a Depression-era farm family was shelved by the venerable Random House, which feared that the market would not support two novels on the same theme.

Bitterly disappointed, Babb stuck her manuscript in a drawer in 1939, and there it remained until 2004, when it was rescued by the University of Oklahoma Press.

At 97, Babb earned long-overdue praise for the novel, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” an acutely observed chronicle of one family’s flight from the drought and dust storms of the high plains to the migrant camps of California during the 1930s.

Reviewers called it a “long-forgotten masterpiece” and “an American classic both literary and historical,” as compelling as Steinbeck’s epic work and in some ways more authentic.

in the 1940s in defiance of California’s anti-miscegenation laws, Babb died of natural causes on Dec. 31 at her Hollywood Hills home, said Joanne Dearcopp, her longtime agent and literary executor. She was 98.

“She was a wonderful poet, a good short-story writer and a fine novelist,” said author Ray Bradbury, who knew Babb for more than 60 years.