When spring arrives in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the California landscape bursts with beauty: “Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea,” he writes, “then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks.” California’s beauty often feels like an overly generous gift, so gorgeous that it's almost impossible for me to accept it. Whenever my family drives down Highway 1, it seems as though it would take a lifetime to truly appreciate the stunning scenery: the cascading brush, the purple thistle plants, the shadowy pink light that hugs the cliffs at sunset. It’s difficult to separate these places from books like East of Eden or The Pearl. Steinbeck’s novels imbue Northern California with a kind of magic — his intoxicating descriptions of Salinas and Monterey swell off the page, as if the whole expanse of human emotion could be felt within the county limits. 

Until recently, I had never considered the California writers who might have slipped between the cracks of our collective memory — the writers who have had just as great a hand as Steinbeck in shaping this lasting image of the state. Sonoma County Poet Laureate Iris Jamahl Dunkle recently visited UC Berkeley to discuss her new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb. Sanora Babb crossed paths with giants of American literature, such as Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and, of course, John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath likely would not have been written if not for Babb, but few readers have ever heard of her. Dunkle has dedicated her career to the stories of writers like Sanora Babb — by decentering our male dominated view of literary history, particularly in California, she finally gives these women the credit, attention, and respect they deserve. 

Sanora Babb was born into extreme poverty in Red Rock, Colorado in 1907. The family lived in a dugout, a lifestyle her father compared to “living in a grave.” Babb learned to read from newspapers that had been glued to the walls. Eventually, she left the the US, living in England and even touring the USSR before settling in California. Her adventurous spirit led her to volunteer in Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps, labor camps filled with Midwesterners escaping the Dust Bowl disaster. It was here that she met John Steinbeck. The camp manager Tom Collins introduced the two, and encouraged Babb to give Steinbeck her copious notes from the camps — notes that would form the basis of the final draft of Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. 

A few months later, Babb temporarily moved to Manhattan and finished a novel of her own. Whose Names Are Unknown follows a struggling family in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. The family eventually migrates to California, but they are soon disillusioned by life in the labor camps. Babb writes, “Their dreams thudded down on them, like the overripe pears they had walked on, too long waiting to see the stem.” However, when Babb went to submit her finished manuscript, her publisher turned it down. It was far too similar to another recently published novel by a more famous author: Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. “What rotten luck for you,” her publisher said. 

Babb had a uniquely intimate perspective on the Dust Bowl crisis; after all, she had lived it herself. Steinbeck, on the other hand, had been to Oklahoma only once, on a road trip. He claimed that he followed a group of migrants from Oklahoma to California in February 1938 with Tom Collins, but, according to Dunkle’s extensive research, there is no evidence that this actually happened. Steinbeck’s lack of connection to the Midwest translates into his writing: in her talk, Dunkle noted that, “where Steinbeck victimizes his characters, Babb humanizes them.” Very little of The Grapes of Wrath is spent in Oklahoma — for most of the novel, we see the Joad family uprooted and in crisis, trying to find their footing in California. On the other hand, in Whose Names Are Unknown, the characters are firmly situated in their homeland. They are people with real stories and authentic connections to their farm - more than just people fleeing a disaster. As Dunkle writes, we get to know the characters “before the worst day of their lives.” 

Whose Names Are Unknown wasn’t published until 2004. For most of literary history, women have literally been on the margins. For example, John Steinbeck’s wife Carol wrote hundreds of careful edits in the margins of his drafts, but few know about the crucial role she played in his success. Women’s history is also notoriously difficult to investigate. Devalued for centuries, information about and by women is often excluded from historical archives. In her book, Dunkle notes that the very word "archive" comes from the Greek word “archeion,” the house of the ruler. “That means that what is left in and out of the archive is a political act,” Dunkle writes. More often than not, women are regarded as narrative devices, rather than narrators. They are tools that let us get to the point, and discarded as soon as that point is reached. They are Sanora Babb’s notes, a tool on the way to someone else’s literary greatness, thrown away and forgotten once that greatness is achieved.

“Do you ever dream about these women?” an audience member asked after the talk. It was something I’d heard writers talk about before — the way that writing about a certain person could completely absorb one’s consciousness, as if it were possible to conjure them up in front of you, with words alone. But Dunkle responded no. The only thing that came close, Dunkle said, was being in the same places these women had been. In light of Dunkle’s work, it was a fitting answer. Women’s history isn’t always the stuff of dreams; their stories are tucked away in discarded manuscripts and unread novels. Piecing these traces back together is difficult work, requiring us to look closely at what is often unvalued and forgotten. Dunkle emphasized the importance of connecting with the women of the past through embodied experiences, anchored in the physical world—something about their spaces lets us imagine their lives even more deeply than we could in our dreams.

Dunkle refuses to let women like Sanora Babb be forgotten, and she has dedicated her career to remembering and celebrating their achievements. Her most recent book, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, follows London’s remarkable life as a writer, editor and business woman. She was also Jack London’s wife. Over the fall break, my parents and I visited the Londons’ ranch in Glen Ellen. It was one of those beautiful winter days — we listened to a De La Soul album on our car’s CD player as we drove towards the park, watching the cold sun drift over the sloping Sonoma hills. The sign leading into the property was painted on a giant piece of wood: “Jack London State Park,” it read, in big white letters. However, as we explored the ranch, Charmian’s hand felt far more present than her husband's. She was an active business partner in the property, and edited several of her husband’s novels. The state park’s exhibit on Charmian London was heavily inspired by Dunkle’s biography. One plaque notes that the couple regularly practiced boxing together, and Charmian once punched her husband into a wall so hard that he cracked the wood panelling. As we walked through Charmian’s rooms in the couple’s cottage, I remembered what Dunkle had said about dreams. The museum showed the texture of her life: her books, her chairs, the view out her window. It was like a template for a daydream. I imagined Charmian going about her business, doing a run of the property, writing at her desk. The simple act of preserving her space made it so easy to imagine her life, and to understand the depth of her singularity. 

In her memoir, A Ghost in the Throat (2020), the Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa describes a sunken oak forest near County Cork. Once called The Gearagh, the forest was flooded to provide hydroelectric power to the city. Now just the tips of the trees poke out of the surface of the water. It’s a ghostly image, and an apt metaphor for the traces of women in historical and literary records. They are hands reaching out of some great body of water, grasping to make their presence known — and it is up to us to dive beneath the surface, to see the true depth of their contributions.