In which she remembers to post about what she's reading

I've just begun reading Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb, recommended (and lent) to my by a friend. It was written, but not published in the late 30s, only because Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had just been published to wild acclaim and her publisher (Random House--Bennett Cerf was her editor) didn’t think the market could sustain two dust bowl novels. Babb’s novel is much more focused on the day-to-day travails of sustaining family life than Steinbeck’s (who, the forward says, may have actually had access to Babb’s notes from her work coordinating migrant camps in California) and I doubt there are going to be any epic Tom Joad speeches or universalizing archetypes (wasn’t that always the complaint against women writers?) but there are pages and pages of lovely writing and characterization, which no one would ever accuse Steinbeck of. This looks to be more in the line of another beautiful piece of proletarian writing (despite its author's later meretricious career as an anti-communist stooge) To Make My Bread, by Grace Lumpkin, republished a decade or so ago in Alan Wald's series The Radical Novel Reconsidered.