It is likely, but by no means certain, that in May 1938, the writers John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb met in a café near Arvin, California. Both were in town to chronicle the plight of migrants who were flooding the state to escape the decimation of the Dust Bowl. Both were writing fiction about it—Steinbeck had abandoned two novels on the subject earlier that year, while Babb had received an enthusiastic response from Random House for the opening chapters of her novel in progress, Whose Names Are Unknown. And both were connected to Tom Collins, a staffer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency providing aid to the migrants. To Steinbeck, Collins was a friend and a passkey to the migrant experience. To Babb, he was a mentor and supervisor; she had volunteered to document living conditions in the camps.
What happened next is in some ways clear as day, in others frustratingly fuzzy. The clear part is a tale of profound literary unfairness: Steinbeck received FSA field notes, compiled largely (but not entirely) from Babb’s observations and interviews, after which he began a punishing 100-day writing sprint to produce The Grapes of Wrath, the foundational American novel about the Great Depression. Babb’s book, delivered later, would be scotched. The Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf alerted Babb that she was late to the finish line in August 1939. “What rotten luck for you that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ should not only have come out before your book was submitted but should have so swept the country!” Cerf wrote. “Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”
Here’s the fuzzy part: Over time, an understandably frustrated Babb would insist that she, not Collins, had personally handed over the reports to Steinbeck—an act that would make his appropriation look more brazen and personal. “Tom asked me to give him my notes,” Babb would write 40 years after that alleged café meeting. “I did. Naïve me.” It doesn’t appear that Steinbeck ever wrote about meeting Babb, or even mentioned her by name, though it’s plausible that two diligent reporters on the same beat would want to compare notes.
Fuzzier still is the question of how much of Grapes was written on the back of the FSA notes, how much of that research was Babb’s—and how much it matters. Her observations almost certainly helped Steinbeck shape his rendering of the migrants. Babb’s entries were rich and thorough—having grown up on a failing farm in the Oklahoma panhandle, she was particularly trusted by Collins to connect with the migrants. When Babb shared her jottings, directly or indirectly, she was likely motivated by the urge to get their experience across through whatever medium might help them.