Babb, Sanora: The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression

Sanora Babb (1907-2005) is the author of nine books, as well as essays, short stories, and poems that were published in literary and progressive magazines alongside the work of Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Ann Porter, Genevieve Taggard, and William Carlos Williams. In the 1930s and 40s Babb was a social activist with the pen and pursued both journalism and short stories, some of which became the seeds for her later books. She taught courses on short fiction writing in the UCLA extension program and had stories published in The Best American Short Stories. Babb's stories reflect her strong empathy with marginalized people and their daily lives, an affinity with the natural world, and the ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary.