The Dark Earth and Selected Prose from the Great Depression

This collection of short stories and journalism by Sanora Babb, written between 1932 and 1949, brings to life the painful period of the Great Depression. With unique insight, Babb writes with passion and empathy gained from personal experience. Whether real or fictional, the people in these pages may struggle but they are also bursting with potential and hope.

From her work with the Farm Security Administration and as a labor organizer, Babb was eyewitness to the lives of displaced farmers from the Dust Bowl and immigrant laborers, striking miners and refugees. She recorded their experiences of food insecurity, of jailings and beatings by sheriffs and strike-breakers with a sympathetic ear and an unblinking eye. Here are a former prostitute, fully trained and working as a surgeon in a Moscow hospital in the early days of the Soviet Union; an ambitious proto-feminist war worker creating her own business; a reformed gambler looking forward to one last honest game. Babb advocates for workers in her journalism and in her short stories she expresses the beauty and pain of struggling individuals. While some of Babb's stories may seem quaint to modern readers, they survive the test of time through their powerful evocation of a sense of place, sensitivity to complex family relationships, and environmental or eco-feminist sensibility.

Arranged chronologically, from early autobiographical short fiction to her leftist journalism to her later innovative stories, Babb interweaves fiction and non-fiction, prescient of today's creative non-fiction. Included are short stories published in literary and progressive journals as diverse as Kansas Magazine and The Anvil, reportage written for New Masses, The Clipper, and New Theater, as well as a selection of previously unpublished fiction and reportage. This new collection includes Babb's preface to her four-story collection The Dark Earth and a new introduction by Erin Royston Battat.