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A Woman Who Defined the Great Depression

John Steinbeck based “The Grapes of Wrath” on Sanora Babb’s notes. But she was writing her own American epic.

The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions.Just when her carefully composed early short stories and essays began attracting the attention of New York editors, she signed a contract for a novel about the Dust Bowl, based on her youthful experience in Red Rock, Oklahoma; and in order to further research the westward migration of her fellow Oklahomans, she took a volunteer job with the Farm Security Administration in Southern California, helping to move refugees into state-funded, self-governing resettlement camps. Steinbeck dedicated The Grapes of Wrath to the individual who he felt had most helped him: Sanora Babb’s supervisor.Steinbeck’s prose infused the landscape with almost heavenly ambience, seeming to argue that the world was bountiful enough for everybody, if wealthy landowners could be forced to stop hoarding its riches. She traveled extensively, often hitchhiking alone across country and through Mexico; she wrote the lyrics for a popular song, which were then “swiped” by someone who published them under their own name; and she organized a walnut growers’ strike in Modesto, California, which caused her to spend at least one night in jail.

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