Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb eds. by Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb eds. by Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith
• Caroline Straty Kraft

Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith, eds., Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 2021. 230 pp. Paper, $26.95; e-book, $21.95.

With this collection of thirteen essays, Joanne Dearcopp and Christine Hill Smith bring the life and work of Sanora Babb to the forefront of twentieth-century American writing of the Great Plains and US West. The essays work toward the recovery of a writer who was, at one time, more established, particularly for her poetry and short stories. Today, thanks in part to Ken Burn's Dust Bowl documentary series, she is primarily known for her previously overlooked Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, written in 1939 but unpublished until 2004. Dearcopp and Smith have compiled a series of essays that address Babb's wide-ranging literary works in the context of her life with a particular emphasis on how Babb focused on topics such as feminism, racism, and environmentalism that make her especially relevant for twenty-first century audiences.

David M. Wrobel's foreword makes the case for returning to Babb's work for its importance in the American literary canon and for the way in which her activism, explored in several of the essays, shines a light on social justice throughout the twentieth century. Many of the essays that follow highlight Babb's luminous writing, particularly her emphasis on characters who struggle to endure during times of crisis and how they engage with their surrounding landscape.

Born in 1907 in Otoe territory before Oklahoma became a state, Babb grew up in the Plains region and witnessed firsthand the poverty [End Page 390] and hardscrabble farming that drove so many families further and further west. She developed a great love for the natural world and her writing often reflected the interconnected relationship between the environment and humans. Erin Royston Battat emphasizes this connection in her essay when she argues that what stands out in Babb's writing is "the connection between her environmental consciousness, rooted in her western upbringing and her feminist thought" (40). Although Battat's essay specifically situates Babb within the context of scholars working on the recovery of western women's narratives and the frontier myth, many of the essays point to the ways in which Babb simultaneously updates and dismantles themes often found in Great Plains literature, such as manifest destiny, women as the exclusive caregivers in a household, and the happy agrarian.

There are two figures that quietly haunt the edges of this collection: John Steinbeck and scholar Douglas Wixson. After the success of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), Random House rescinded their offer for Babb's Dust Bowl novel, believing the market could only sustain one such work. Christopher Bowman explores this episode in his essay while arguing that Babb's novel surpasses Steinbeck's book in the way it engages with climate change and presages ecocriticism. Eight of the essays refer to Douglas Wixson, a scholar of Babb and her earliest biographer, who edited Babb's field notes for On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (2007). Although Wixson passed away before he was able to complete his biography of Babb, his groundbreaking work on Babb and his steadfast commitment to promoting her writing is reflected throughout the collection and noted by Dearcopp and Smith in their introduction.

At the heart of much of Babb's writing is her insistence on the connection between identity and place through her depiction of farmers who realize they are dependent on nature and have a hand in shaping it through agricultural practices and land management. This collection of essays reveals how Babb's ecocritical approach, combined with her sense of progressive feminism, places her ahead of her time and renders her writing relevant for twenty-first century audiences. The essays also help generate a dialogue about how to read Babb alongside other authors. Daryl W. Palmer contextualizes [End Page 391] Babb's memoir, An Owl on Every Post (1970), with Willa Cather's My Ántonía (1918) and F. Scott Fitzgerald...