The most profound obstacle Babb faced in her strenuous life was a case of bad writerly luck of now-legendary proportions. Although she took the cautious upward route of many self-taught young writers, she never caught the decisive break she needed.
Just when her carefully composed early short stories and essays began attracting the attention of New York editors, she signed a contract for a novel about the Dust Bowl, based on her youthful experience in Red Rock, Oklahoma; and in order to further research the westward migration of her fellow Oklahomans, she took a volunteer job with the Farm Security Administration in Southern California, helping to move refugees into state-funded, self-governing resettlement camps. Initially, Babb only intended to gather information; but as in everything she did, she soon developed a passionate concern for the people she met and the stories she heard, hurling herself into the project with the fierce intensity of a woman who always seemed to be working twice as hard as everyone around her.
Her supervisor, Tom Collins, summed up her achievement in a letter he wrote to Babb at the conclusion of her work:
1. You visited tents, shacks, cabins and hovels. 472 families or 2175 men, women, and children.
2. You interviewed and signed up 309 families or 1465 men, women and children.
3. Total families you met and know 781.4. Total individuals you met and know 3640.5. You, therefore, spread happiness and hope to all these—and we thank you with all our hearts.
Her work for the FSA yielded hundreds of pages of notes and photographs, many of which were posthumously gathered in On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (2007). These laboriously accumulated pages would testify to two overriding aspects of Babb’s character: that she wasn’t afraid of work and that she possessed an almost bottomless compassion for everybody she met who led a tougher life than she had.
When a friend of her supervisor arrived at the camps to research his own novel, Collins convinced Babb to turn over a copy of her extensive field notes. The writer’s name was John Steinbeck; he had plenty of talent and compassion of his own; and he knew how to make quick use of good material when he saw it. Much of Babb’s work went straight into Steinbeck’s next draft—especially the portions set in a California refugee camp. And after The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller, Babb turned in the final draft of her own Dust Bowl novel to Bennet Cerf, only to be told that the bookstores weren’t big enough for two novels on the subject. And so Babb’s novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, lay unpublished—despite continuous revisions and submissions to alternate publishers—for nearly half a century.