John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is one of the great American novels. It captures the experience of many who came to California during the Dust Bowl to work in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. But Steinbeck wasn’t the only novelist working on a book in Kern County’s labor camps. Today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots the story of author Sanora Babb.
While the Grapes of Wrath is fiction, it’s fiction based on fact. Steinbeck did his own research, visiting farm labor camps in Kern County. He also used material from Tom Collins, who managed the Weedpatch camp in Arvin for the Farm Security Administration.
That’s where Sanora Babb comes in. She was a journalist who volunteered to work in the camp in 1938. Collins was her boss. She took detailed notes from interviews with the families there. She was so moved by their stories she began work on her own novel. Her manuscript made it to an executive at Random House, who praised it, and promised to publish it. But when Viking published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, Random House backed out. They said the market couldn’t support both books.
But that’s not the end of the story. It turns out Collins had shared Babb’s notes from the Weedpatch Camp with Steinbeck, and Steinbeck used them as source material for his book. She had unintentionally helped her competitor.
Babb went on to have her own distinguished career. Her Dust Bowl-era novel “Whose Names Are Unknown” was finally published in 2004, one year before her death.
