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b o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 5 The conversation arcs from carefully nuanced textual details to large cul­ tural questions. Close readings—Handley on narrative point of view, Campbell on tropes offixity, Tatum on Arthur Keller’s illustrations—undergird broad ideo­ logical inquiry. Lamont asks how the field of cultural production is constituted. Owens asks how “establishment America" exploits the West as a “capitalist resource” (85). Tuttle, echoing Donna Haraway, asks howpopular writing enacts “the taxidermic gesture of conquest” (105). These essayists consistently forbid the novel to be innocent of history, bringing personal, publishing, legal, labor, and Native histories to bear. Richard Hutson explores the ideological legacies in the novel’s “prolonged afterlife” as stageplay and film (127). Kollin reflects on problems of “land use, tenure rights, and race relations” bequeathed to the New West (237). Choctaw/Cherokee/ Irish critic Louis Owens calls, stirringly, for ethical inquiry: “Who defines the West and its constituent element? Whose novel is the West, and who gets to tell the story?” (74). This volume probes those crucial questions with astute skepticism about how meaning is made and with exemplary intellectual and cultural reach. Whose Nam es Are Unknown. By Sanora Babb. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. 222 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Douglas Wixson, Professor Emeritus University of Missouri, Rolla The tale of Sanora Babb’s first novel—its abandonment, subsequent recovery, and publication some sixty-four years later—owes in part to the long life of its author, the devotion of a few close friends, including her literary agent Joanne Dearcopp, and a renewed interest in Depression-era radical literature. Bom in Oklahoma Territory shortly before statehood (1907) to a professional gambler and his young bride ofgenteel upbringing, Babb and her sister Dorothy spent their early childhood accompanying their father’s restless moves, often to avoid the law. In 1913, the family settled on a broomcom farm on the arid, wind-swept High Plains of eastern Colorado, their rudimentary home a dugout homesteaded by Babb’s grandfather. After repeated crop failures, the Babb family retreated to Forgan in the Oklahoma panhandle, where Babb, graduat­ ing first in her high school class, was denied the opportunity to deliver the valedictory address because she was “the gambler’s daughter.” A reporter for the Garden City Telegram (Kansas) at age nineteen, Babb obtained her Associated Press credentials before moving to Los Angeles in 1929 to seek work as a jour­ nalist. Part of a generation of talented young women such as Marguerite Smith Roberts (screenwriter), Martha Gellhom (journalist), Ttllie Lemer Olsen (writer), Kay Van Riper (radio script writer), and Meridel Le Sueur (writer), Babb took personal risks in breaking through gender and social barriers that limited a woman’s access to a professional career. 2 1 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 In the late 1930s, Babb became the assistant to a Farm Security Adminis­ tration (FSA) Camp Manager named Tom Collins. In the FSA camps, Babb located and registered refugee families, organized committees for camp admin­ istration, ministered to the sick, and intervened on behalf of the displaced farmers to secure improved working conditions in the fields. She took notes on all that she saw. Collins, eager to publicize the beleaguered refugees’ plight, asked Babb to share her notes with John Steinbeck, whose journalistic reports of the migrant camps had recently appeared as a series of articles published in the San Francisco News. While Steinbeck was writing the final draft of The Grapes of Wrath in his Los Gatos home, Babb penned early drafts of her own Dust Bowl refugee novel at night in the FSA camps, despite exhaustion from serving the overwhelming needs of the dispossessed farmers. She submitted several chapters to the editors of Random House publishers, who flew her to New York City in the late spring of 1939, gave her an advance, and urged her to finish her novel. In April of 1939, Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl novel appeared from Viking Press, quickly gaining acclaim and...

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