The widow of Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, whom she
dated in the 1940s in defiance of California's anti-miscegenation laws died.
Babb wrote five books, including a novelized memoir, a volume of
poetry and a collection of short stories. Two of her stories were
chosen for the 1950 and 1960 editions of the distinguished anthology
series "Best American Short Stories," edited by Martha Foley.
She and her family lived with him in a one-room dugout, an
underground room dug out of the dirt. She was bitten by a rat,
witnessed the stillbirth of a brother and gave up precious
belongings to help her family survive repeated crop failures.
Her grandfather taught her to read from a volume about the
adventures of legendary frontiersman Kit Carson and newspaper
articles about murders and scandals that he had plastered on the
dugout walls for insulation. She did not attend school until she was
11 but caught up quickly and graduated from high school as
valedictorian.
Babb eventually became a journalist for Associated Press and moved
to Los Angeles. She was about to begin work at the Los Angeles Times
when the stock market crashed in 1929. The writer spent much of the
next decade broke and homeless, often sleeping in Lafayette Park.
She eventually found a job as a radio scriptwriter and wrote stories
and poems that appeared in literary magazines, including the Prairie
Schooner, the Anvil and Southwest Review. Many of her friends were
struggling writers, including William Saroyan, John Fante, Carlos
Bulosan, John Sanford, Meridel Le Sueur and Ralph Ellison. Babb
joined the Communist Party and, like many other left-leaning writers
of her generation, sought foreign adventures, visiting the Soviet
Union in 1936 and reporting on the Spanish Civil War for the British
journal This Week.
In 1938 she returned to California to work as an assistant to Tom
Collins, manager of the Farm Security Administration, the federal
agency established to help poor farmers during the Depression.
She kept detailed notes on her experiences setting up tent camps and
organizing protests among the Dust Bowl refugees who had wound up in
the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys. According to Douglas Wixson,
an emeritus professor at the University of Texas who is writing
Babb's biography, Collins borrowed her notes to share with
Steinbeck, who was visiting the camps to gather material for "The
Grapes of Wrath." Widely acclaimed when it was published in 1939, it
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into an Oscar-
winning movie directed by John Ford.
Babb met Steinbeck briefly at a lunch counter but was not sure he
ever read her notes. They became the basis for her own novel, which
she began writing while working in the camps. She sent the first few
chapters to Random House, where they impressed editor and co-founder
Bennett Cerf. He paid her way to New York and put her up in a hotel
to complete the novel. In a letter to Babb, he pronounced it
an "exceptionally fine" work of fiction and planned to publish it —
until Steinbeck's book swept bestseller lists.
A beautiful woman who was given a screen test by producer Irving
Thalberg, she met Howe, a Chinese American, at the Pickwick
bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard before World War II. In an era of
rampant bigotry, they were not married until 1948, when the state
law banning intermarriage was abolished.
During the 1940s, Babb ran a Chinese restaurant that Howe owned in
North Hollywood. In 1950, during the heat of the communist witch
hunts, she spent more than a year in Mexico. During her self-imposed
exile, she completed "The Lost Traveler," inspired by her complex
relationship with her father. Issued in 1958, it was her first
published novel.
Her other books include "An Owl on Every Post," a 1970 memoir of her
childhood in the Colorado wilderness that William Fadiman, writing
in the Los Angeles Times, called "an evocative glimpse of a vanished
era"; "Cry of the Tinamou," a 1997 compilation of short stories;
and "Told in the Seed," a 1998 collection of poems.
Babb waited 65 years in the shadow of a literary giant for her first
completed novel to be published. Upstaged in 1939 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, and there it ained 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.
