Whose Names Are Unknown (review)

Recently there has been a good deal of news coverage about plagiarism at the highest levels of academe and in the publishing world. On July 16, 2006 Southern Illinois University Chancellor Vaughn Vandegrift was accused of "borrowing" from other sources for his campus Martin Luther King day speech.¹ Earlier in the year, the Harvard Crimson covered the charges of plagiarism against author and Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan whose recent novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was found to contain many similar passages and some direct copying of text from Megan F. McCafferty's 2001 novel, Sloppy Firsts, as well as her 2003 novel, Second Helpings.² After the allegations of plagiarism surfaced, Viswanathan's publisher, Little Brown, revoked its contract with the young author in disapproval, and Dreamworks, the movie production company which had bought the rights to Opal, was said to be considering a similar move.

Notably, John Steinbeck, despite his fame, might have incurred similar charges were he alive and writing today. Critic John Timmerman notes that Steinbeck called himself a "shameless magpie," referring to a bird that often takes the belongings of other avians and humans and appropriates them for its own use. Specifically, while he was alive Steinbeck was accused of borrowing the stories that comprise Pastures of Heaven from Beth Ingalls, his neighbor and friend who had an initial idea about the influence that a single family could produce on a secluded valley. He also was accused of "borrowing" the ideas of Edith Wagner for his short story "How Edith McGillicuddy Met Robert Louis Stevenson."

Since the publication of Sanora Babb's novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, almost 65 years after it was written, new allegations of blatant appropriation of another author's material have been leveled at Steinbeck, this time over the similarity of passages in his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, to scenes in Babb's first literary attempt. And, after perusing the book carefully, one can easily see why these accusations might have some merit, especially in today's combative publishing arena.

Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle herself, Babb composed her novel in the mid-thirties while she was working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration camps of California. First traveling to the Los Angeles area as an Associated Press reporter in 1929, she eventually joined the FSA administrator, Tom Collins, (to whom Steinbeck's Grapes is dedicated, along with Steinbeck's wife, Carol), in an attempt to help uprooted farmers from her home state. Her novel, like Steinbeck's, attempted to put a human face on economic and social distress. After being highly praised by Random House editor Bennett Cerf, subsequent to its submission in 1939 and considered favorably for publication, it was eventually shelved when Grapes swept the nation, for it seemed unlikely that the book market could sustain yet another volume about the Okies and the Dust Bowl.

According to Lawrence B. Rodgers' foreword to the hardcover edition, Collins, as the manager of the Arvin (Steinbeck's Weedpatch) camp, actually perused Babb's manuscript and was so impressed that "he requested a copy to share with another writer who was visiting to research a novel" (Foreword x). If this remembrance is accurate, "it is easy to imagine that her notes helped in some way to fuel [Steinbeck's] imagination" (Rodgers, Foreword, x).

Some of the obvious similarities that even a cursory reading will reveal are Babb's two accounts of a still-born baby. Babb writes: "Milt had not thought about the baby being dead. . . The puckered face looked unborn and helpless. His big head lay on the side and he looked terribly still" (43-45). A similar passage occurs on page 143 where a character comments on a dead fetus: "that baby looks like a little old man, and not a pound of good solid flesh on him. It ain't his fault he comes into the world and then he come in starved. . . . He's all...