Riding like the wind, p.33
Riding Like the Wind, page 33
16. Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Random House, 2001), xiv.
17. Carol S. Loranger, “Erratic Orbit: Sanora Babb, Poet,” in Dearcopp and Smith, eds., Unknown No More, 142.
18. Babb to Carol, March 27, 1960, HRC 28.7.
19. Babb to Carol, March 27, 1960, HRC 28.7.
20. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
21. HRC 4.2.
22. The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (Grosset & Dunlap, 1952), 222.
23. San Bernardino Sun, vol. 61, no. 174, February 22, 1928.
24. HRC 2.1.
25. Babb to Reed, August 1, 1978, HRC 37.4; and HRC 58.7.
26. Babb to Reed, August 1, 1978, HRC 37.4.
27. Babb to Reed, August 1, 1978, HRC 37.4.
28. Babb would also include the character of William Shakespeare in the initial draft of her first published novel, The Lost Traveler. “Typescript draft, 1947,” 186–87, HRC Container 92.
29. Babb to Wixson, undated, HRC 58.7.
30. Babb to Reed, August 1, 1978, HRC 37.4.
31. Wixon, “Radical by Nature,” 119–20.
32. Douglas Wixson, Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898–1990 (University of Illinois Press, 1994), 583.
33. The article was reprinted in the Clarion Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), the York Daily Record (York, Pennsylvania), the Rutland Daily Herald (Rutland, Vermont), the Morning News (Wilmington, Delaware), the Stockton Daily Independent (Stockton, California), the Billings Gazette (Billings, Montana), the Idaho Daily Statesman (Boise, Idaho), the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, Texas), the San Bernadino County Sun (San Bernadino, California), the Searchlight (Redding, California), and the Independent Record (Helena, Missouri).
34. Loranger, “Erratic Orbit,” 142.
35. Loranger, “Erratic Orbit,” 144.
36. HRC 23.8.
37. Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C,” The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47428/the-comedian-as-the-letter-c, line 1.
38. Babb recounts a scene like this in the opening chapters of Lost Traveler.
39. HRC 7.10.
40. According to Babb’s Guggenheim application, HRC 19.5.
41. Babb writes about Kelley’s departure in an early draft of Lost Traveler, 140, HRC, Container 92.
42. Dorothy Babb to Esther McCoy, 1951 or 1954, Esther McCoy Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.
43. Babb, Lost Traveler, 232–33.
44. Both letters can be found in HRC 58.7.
Chapter 7. “Fling This Wild Song”
1. Sanora Babb, “Passenger Trains and Harvey Houses: A Writer’s Tribute,” Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
2. HRC 58.7.
3. HRC 58.7 and HRC 28.6.
4. HRC 24.7.
5. HRC 24.7.
6. Interview with Mann, 1982, HRC 28.6.
7. HRC 58.7.
8. Babb to Wald, 1989, HRC 54.8.
9. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
10. The Hollywood chapter was started by Norman MacLeod in late 1931, according to Alan Wald (Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left [University of North Carolina Press, 2002], 104).
11. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
12. HRC 19.5.
13. HRC 58.7.
14. Interview with Mann, 1982, HRC 28.6.
15. Van Riper to Babb, 1947, HRC 4.6.
16. Babb to Pollard, July 17, 1931, HRC 49.4.
17. Interview with Mann, 1982, HRC 28.6.
18. HRC 28.6.
19. Dialog in this scene is from the Daniel Mann Papers, file 122, Margaret Herrick Library.
20. These headshots are located in HRC 66.1.
21. Thalberg was only eight years older than Babb.
22. Dialog in this scene is from the Daniel Mann Papers, file 122, Margaret Herrick Library.
23. Sanora Babb, The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression (Muse Ink, 2021), xii.
24. Babb, Dark Earth, xii.
25. Babb, Dark Earth, xii.
26. The library opened at its permanent location in 1926.
27. Hadley Meares, “Stanley Rose’s Humble Bookstore Was the Center of Literary LA in the 1930s,” LAist, March 19, 2019, https://laist.com/news/la-history/stanley-rose-bookstore-literary-las-hottest-spot-1930s.
28. As Babb recalled in a letter to Wixson in 1996, “Stanley Rose’s Bookshop was on Hollywood Blvd. It was not a leftist bookstore, but a wonderful store that writers favored mainly because of that marvelous character (a Texan) Stanley Rose. It was truly an art hangout. An art gallery in back and good books in front. During the depression when I was flat broke, I did a lot of my good reading there, and was one of SR’s longtime friends.” HRC 58.7.
29. Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 1990), 348.
30. Babb to Saroyan, May 10, 1933: “I did an adaptation for a Ronald Colman picture about four years ago, but shortly after lost my ‘wires’‚” (her connections to Hollywood to sell screenplays). William Saroyan Papers, 1926-1981, Stanford University Libraries.
31. Wixson, “Radical by Nature,” 120.
32. Babb to Pollard, July 17, 1931, HRC 49.4.
33. Saroyan to Babb, September 6, 1932, William Saroyan Papers, 1926-1981, Stanford University Libraries.
34. HRC 27.4.
35. Nona Balakian, The World of William Saroyan (Bucknell University Press, 1998), 135–37.
36. “In Progress: Costa Rica and Panama,” HRC 27.11.
37. “In Progress: Costa Rica and Panama,” HRC 27.11.
38. Babb to Saroyan, HRC 52.5.
39. “In Progress: Costa Rica and Panama,” HRC 27.11.
40. “In Progress: Costa Rica and Panama,” HRC 27.11.
41. San Francisco Call, Thursday, June 23, 1932, HRC 58.8.
42. Interview with Mann, 1982, HRC 28.6.
43. Daniel Mann Papers, file 122, Margaret Herrick Library.
44. Interview with Mann, 1982, HRC 28.6.
45. Todd Rainsberger, James Wong Howe, Cinematographer (A. S. Barnes, 1981), 11.
46. Babb to Howe, January 1933, HRC 45.2.
47. Sanora Babb, “Poppies in the Wind,” Windsor Quarterly: Modern American Literature 1, no. 2 (Summer 1933): 175.
48. “Poppies in the Wind,” 176.
49. Conroy to Babb, August 7, 1933, HRC 34.4.
50. “The Old One,” The Midland, March/April 1933, 30.
51. Babb to Saroyan, March 27, 1933, William Saroyan Papers, 1926-1981, Stanford University Libraries. See also the letter she received from Clifton Fadiman at Simon & Schuster dated November 3, 1932, in which he asks if she has any projects afoot, “particularly if they include a project for a novel.” (The letter was sent in care of Clay editor José García Villa, who was then living at 302 West 12th St. in New York City.) HRC 53.5.
52. HRC 70.1.
53. Babb to Saroyan, January 1935, HRC 52.5.
54. Babb to Saroyan, March 27, 1934, HRC 52.5.
55. As she recalls in a letter to her friend Nora, “He threw pebbles at my windows and shouted loud enough to be heard for blocks, ‘Sanora, I love you! Let’s get married!’ Jimmie was visiting me. He and Dorothy my sister were sitting talking. Then William came to the door, and I had to ask him in. He was introduced to Jimmie and then tried to pass it all off as a joke.” HRC 52.5. Babb also remembers their relationship in a note written on the outside of a letter dated March 28, 1934, HRC Container 42.
Chapter 8. The Writers’ Congress
1. “Early Chronology,” HRC 58.7.
2. Sanora Babb, Told in the Seed and Selected Poems (Muse Ink, 2021), 115.
3. HRC 58.7.
4. Babb to Pollard, July 17, 1931, HRC 49.4.
5. Babb to Saroyan, April 27, 1933, William Saroyan Papers, 1926-1981, Stanford University Libraries.
6. Interview with James Wong Howe’s nephew Don Lee, June 21, 2022.
7. One of these assignments was a play Babb wrote for her sister called South Dakota Farm: A One-Act Play. HRC 27.2.
8. Dorothy Babb, “Konkie,” Kansas Magazine, 1949, HRC 70.1.
9. Sanora Babb, On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps, ed. Douglas Wixson, photographs by Dorothy Babb (University of Texas Press, 2007), 45.
10. Babb, Dirty Plate Trail, 48.
11. Babb, Dirty Plate Trail, 49.
12. Le Sueur to Babb, February 9, 1935, HRC 47.7. All quotations from Le Sueur throughout the following paragraphs are from this letter.
13. Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur (University of Illinois Press, 1998), 16.
14. Ann George and Jack Selzer, “What Happened at the First American Writers’ Congress? Kenneth Burke’s ‘Revolutionary Symbolism in America,’‚” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2003): 47–66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886097.
15. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
16. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection. At the time, Olsen was under contract with Random House and writing her novel Yonnondio.
17. Panthea Reid, Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles (Rutgers University Press, 2010), 104.
18. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
19. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
20. Reid, Tillie Olsen, 105.
21. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
22. Reid, Tillie Olsen, 105.
23. Le Sueur to Babb, 1935, HRC 50.1.
24. Babb, Dark Earth, 61.
25. Babb, Dark Earth, 64.
26. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
27. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
28. Wixson, Worker-Writer in America, 395.
29. “Guide to the League of American Writers Archives,” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
30. Coiner, Better Red, 81.
31. Reid, Tillie Olsen, 105.
32. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
33. Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 204.
34. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
35. Harp to Babb, January 8, 1971, HRC 16.4.
36. Reid, Tillie Olsen, 105.
37. Though her book was under contract, Tillie Olsen would not complete her novel during the 1930s. Yonnondio would not be finished and published until the 1970s.
38. Reid, Tillie Olsen, 106–7.
39. Crichton to Babb, July 27, 1932, HRC 42.8.
40. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
41. Reid, Tillie Olsen, 107–8.
42. This is not to say that Olsen did not also have a complicated relationship with the Communist Party. Both she and Le Sueur found themselves committed to the party while they felt “an emerging feminist critique of its androcentrism”; Coiner, Better Red, 16.
43. Nelsen Algren would become a lifelong friend whom Babb would often visit when she passed through Chicago on her cross-country trips, as she stated in a letter to Wixson (February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection).
44. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
45. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
46. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
47. Babb to Wixson, February 12, 1991, Joanne Dearcopp private collection.
Chapter 9. “I Demand You Write More Shamelessly and Nakedly”
1. Latimer was a writer living in New York City who published two highly acclaimed novels, We Are Incredible (1928) and This Is My Body (1930), and two collections of short stories, Nellie Bloom and Other Stories (1929) and Guardian Angel and Other Stories (1932).
2. Le Sueur to Babb, 1935, HRC 50.1.
3. Wald, “Soft Focus: The Short Fiction of Sanora Babb,” Cry of the Tinamou, xv.
4. According to a note written by Babb found in HRC 5.2, as well as her interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058. Rushmore would famously later become an informant for the House Un-American Activities Committee.
5. “Farmers’ Holiday” (May–June 1935), “Farm in Alaska” (July 9, 1935), “Lora” (August 10, 1935).
6. Dorothy Babb, “The Years That Went Away,” 18, HRC 70.3.
7. Babb to Evelyn Brewster, March 3, 1962, HRC 28.7.
8. Rainsberger, James Wong Howe, 20.
9. Rainsberger, James Wong Howe, 20.
10. Howe to Babb, April 21, 1936, HRC 45.3–4.
11. Howe to Babb, May 13, 1936, HRC 45.3–4.
12. Intourist was a Russian tour operator founded April 12, 1929, that served as the primary travel agency for foreign tourists in the USSR.
13. Bulosan to Babb, November 7, 1934, HRC 42.1.
14. Bulosan to Babb, February 14, 1936, HRC 42.2.
15. Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (University of Washington Press, 2014), 232.
16. Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, 230.
17. Bulosan to Babb, March 5, 1936, HRC 42.2.
18. Bulosan to Babb, March 31, 1936, HRC 42.2.
19. HRC 68.1.
20. Babb talks about this shift in their relationship in her interview with Daniel Mann, 1982, HRC 28.6.
21. Babb to Brewster, March 3, 1962, HRC 28.7.
22. Battat, Ain’t Got No Home, 45.
23. Babb to Howe, August 29, 1936, HRC 46.6.
24. In 1946, John Steinbeck would also take a trip to the Soviet Union (with the photographer Robert Capa) and from this experience write A Russian Journal.
25. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
26. S. Babb to D. Babb and Lillie Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
27. HRC 88.5.
28. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
29. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
30. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
31. Babb to Maxim Lieber, January 22, 1962, HRC 35.3.
32. Interview with Wald, Hollywood, July 1989, HRC C3058.
33. S. Babb to D. Babb and Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
34. S. Babb to D. Babb and Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
35. S. Babb to D. Babb and Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
36. Babb to Howe, August 18, 1936, HRC 46.6.
37. Babb to Howe, August 25, 1936, HRC 46.6.
38. The only other letter in which she writes about longing to have a child is a love letter to Ralph Ellison.
39. Prophylactoria were health centers set up after the revolution for prostitutes in the USSR.
40. “Dr. Fera,” HRC 26.6.
41. It’s not clear what ultimately happened regarding Babb’s appendicitis. There is no record of her surgery, but she did state later in a letter to Dorothy that she wanted to wait until she returned to the United States to have surgery.
42. S. Babb to D. Babb and Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
43. S. Babb to D. Babb and Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
44. Fire over England would be in production for fourteen weeks, according to Jerry Vermilye, The Great British Films (Citadel, 1978), 78.
45. S. Babb to D. Babb and Pollard, September 26, 1936, HRC 50.1.
46. Babb to Saroyan, October 27, 1936, William Saroyan Papers, 1926-1981, Stanford University Libraries.
47. S. Babb to W. Babb, November 8, 1936, HRC 40.4.
48. S. Babb to W. Babb, November 7, 1936, HRC 40.4.
49. Rainsberger, James Wong Howe, 21.
50. While in London, she would appear in three films and be part of a play at the Savoy Theatre.
51. Babb to Wixson, undated, HRC 58.7.
52. Interview with Don Lee, James Wong Howe’s nephew, who lived with Sanora Babb toward the end of her life, June 21, 2022.
Chapter 10. “You Can’t Eat the Scenery”
1. Carlos Bulosan, Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile, ed. Dolores S. Feria (N.p., 1960), 202.
2. Dorothy wrote a short story about her visits with Bulosan at the tuberculosis ward called “Aurelio.” This was Bulosan’s brother’s name.
3. Fante describes his friend in the introduction to Bulosan, America Is in the Heart, xx.
4. Bulosan to Babb, April 7, 1938, HRC 42.2.
5. Wixson, “Radical by Nature,” 123.
6. It’s important to note that in John Leggett’s biography of William Saroyan, A Daring Young Man (Knopf, 2002), there is no mention of the important relationship that Saroyan and Babb shared. However, in The World of William Saroyan, by Nona Balakian, she writes, “Babb (Mrs. James Wong Howe) herself attests that Saroyan fell deeply in love with her in 1932 or 1933 . . . and asked to marry her.” Balakian goes on to question, as I do, why “we find no mention of either Ms. Babb or any other strong romantic attachments in the many scattered accounts of Saroyan’s life in the 1930s (his own and others’) and why, indeed, to this day no one who claims to have been close to the writer appears to know of Ms. Babb. Of course, there is one simple reason why this has not come up. For a long time, it was assumed that Saroyan’s love life had but one object: his typewriter. The initial image that he created was of a struggling young man, locked in a cold San Francisco flat, furiously and obsessively turning out stories that he couldn’t sell.” Balakian, World of William Saroyan, 135–37.
7. Maxim Lieber to Babb, November 23, 1934, HRC 35.3. Lieber was Babb’s first literary agent.
8. HRC 7.10.
9. On her 1939 Guggenheim application, Babb quotes this small part of Leviticus 25:35 as an inspiration for the title. HRC 19.5.
