Finding Lost Voices: When Tillie Olsen and Sanora Babb Drove Cross-Country Together in 1935
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
The past week has been an exciting time for my forthcoming biography on Sanora Babb. The Los Angeles Times called it one of the thirty most anticipated books this fall. I was also in conversation with the wonderful writer Kelly McMasters on Lit Hub’s fiction.non.fiction podcast where we talked with hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan about biography ethics. And Kirkus called my biography on Babb “A well-researched empathetic biography.” If you are excited to get a copy, you can order one here. The book officially releases on October 15 (One month and eight days from today, but who is counting down)!
The 1930s was a time that was buzzing with both literary and political activity. It’s also a time when for a brief period, women were finally getting book contracts from the major publishing houses. One of the organizations that brought writers together during this time was the League of American Writers. It’s through Sanora Babb’s involvement with the League that she met the young Tillie Lerner Olsen (1912 -2007). What follows is the story of how Sanora Babb met Tillie Olsen and some background information on Olsen as well.
In early 1935, delegates from the Los Angeles Chapter of the League of American Writers needed to be chosen as representatives for the First Writers Congress, to be held in New York City, Sanora Babb, who found the organization shortly after moving to Los Angeles, eagerly volunteered (she’d been encouraged to by the writer Meridel Le Sueur — whose amazing novel The Girl I featured on a column here a few months back). Babb was chosen to attend, along with the novelist Harry Carlisle, whom she knew from their local chapter. A third delegate, Tillie Lerner Olsen, whom Babb wasn’t as acquainted with, was also chosen. Olsen had just moved from San Francisco to Venice Beach, where she was working on finishing her first novel which was under contract with Random House (the novel she was writing was called Yonnondio - sadly, Olsen wouldn’t be able to finish the book until later in life. It was published in 1974).
Olsen was born in Wahoo, Nebraska to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. When she was a young child, the family moved to Omaha where she attended school until at age fifteen when she dropped out to enter the work force. In 1933, Olsen moved to California, where she took up the fight for workers rights. She was briefly jailed in 1934 while organizing a packing house workers' union and she wrote about her experiences in articles that would appear in The Nation, and The New Republic. She had begun writing a novel and she published an excerpt from it in the Partisan Review. It’s these articles and excerpt that would draw the attention of publishers and eventually land her a book deal with Random House.
The trio of writers left Los Angeles on April 9, 1935, squeezed into “a little one-seat Ford with a cloth top” that “an empathetic MGM producer” had lent them.” They drove through the vast desert of Death Valley and then past the “grand forests near Flagstaff.” As the temperatures dropped, they all froze in the tiny, flimsy convertible. When they arrived at their first destination, Gallup, New Mexico, they found “a virtual war zone, where [International] Labor Defense investigators had been kidnapped, beaten, and left to die.” Olsen wrote about what she saw in a letter to her estranged husband, Abe Goldfarb; they had witnessed “brutalities toward women and children, Slavs and Mexicans—all at the hands of police and ‘gun thugs’ hired by mine owners.” Babb would write one of her earliest nonfiction pieces about what she witnessed during their stop in Gallup, called “The Terror”.
After the trio of writers left Gallup, they continued north through the Rocky Mountains and Denver and on to Omaha, Nebraska, where they stayed the night at the home of Olsen’s in-laws, the Goldfarbs. Olsen’s daughter had been staying with them while Olsen was in Los Angeles writing her novel. Olsen was trying to balance being a mother, a wife, and a writer, which often left her feeling conflicted and which meant that any decision she made was open to judgment by society. This was one of the reasons Babb was wary of getting married, and even warier of having children. After Olsen’s short visit with her daughter, the three writers got back into the convertible and continued their journey.
When they arrived in Chicago, they “stayed in fifty cent hotels, visited factories to talk to workers and looked up author Nelson Algren.” Algren a Chicago-based writer whose first novel, Somebody in Boots, had just been published was deeply involved with the Communist Party. Babb remembered touring the factories in order “to see for ourselves automobiles being manufactured, steel plants in operation, and all sorts of factories.”
On April 26, 1935, they arrived in New York, well before the opening ceremonies of the Writers Congress and just a little over two weeks after they’d begun their cross-country drive. The event was scheduled to last two days.
Earl Browder, general secretary of the CPUSA (Communist Party, USA), delivered the keynote address to all four hundred delegates. Other speakers included Clarence Hathaway, who conveyed greetings to congress attendees from “the entire staff of the Daily Worker,” the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and Joseph Freeman of The New Masses, the party’s literary magazine. In the opening ceremony, the League of American Writers declared itself to be “a voluntary association of writers dedicated to the preservation and extension of a truly democratic culture.” Meridel Le Sueur was there, too, the lone woman among the twenty scheduled speakers. During the panels, readings and events that took place over the next two days, delegates debated “whether they wrote for workers or for everyone, whether unschooled writers were more authentic than sophisticated ones, whether proletarian writers could borrow techniques from bourgeois writers, and whether message was more important than art.” Babb joined the May Day parade, finding the mass of writers marching down Broadway chanting “We write for the working class” in metered unison to be “a big thrill.”
Yet, while Babb was excited to be at the congress, she didn’t always agree with the sentiments that the panels were exulting. She didn’t know if she completely agreed with the call to create “proletarian art.” Like Le Sueur and Olsen, Babb was experiencing what Elaine Showalter has called an “object/field problem.” She wanted to write about the poor—in fact, she embodied a deep commitment to writing about them—but she didn’t want to do so with a prescribed agenda. As she recalled, “My poems and stories had been appearing in literary magazines since the late 20s and since I grew up poor, I wrote about such people, but I was opposed then and still am to slant my writing. This was a real bone of contention when I was in the left movement.”
When Babb left New York on April 29, 1935, she left fortified by the community that she’d found at the congress. Olsen and Carlisle drove back to California in the convertible without her. At the talks, panels, bars, and restaurants she’d gone to, Babb had met writers from all over the country who were passionate about the topics she was also passionate about. She’d met publishers like Bennett Cerf who would soon play a significant role in her future as a writer. But she also left with the fire of her independence ignited inside her.
After the Writers’ Congress, Olsen would move back to San Francisco. She would eventually marry Jack Olsen in 1944. They would have four daughters. Olsen would return to her writing career in the 1950s when her youngest daughter started school, and she was able to enroll in a creative writing course at San Francisco State. She applied to the Stanford Creative Writing Fellowship with her then still unfinished story, “I Stand Here Ironing”—and won. The fellowship bought her what she needed most in order to write: time. And for the first time in years, she did not have to work outside the home, except on her writing. She would also go on to receive the Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1959 the support from which helped her finish Tell Me a Riddle: A Collection in 1961. Olsen would go on to become an advisor for Feminist Press, where she worked to get feminist classics like Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis back in print. She would also receive a fellowship at Radcliffe where she was in the same cohort as poet Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, and sculptor Marianna Pineda. (Maggie Doherty writes about this era of Olsen’s life in her extraordinary group biography, The Equivalents).
Her 1978 Olden published Silences, a book about not having the time and space to write as a woman, and about not being heard. Silences is the first book by Olsen I encountered and it became one that I’ve often returned to. As Feminist Press describes Silences:
“In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent—the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors’ letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen’s heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her.”
Through Olsen and Babb didn’t always see eye to eye. They shared one of the most important journeys of their lives together. A cross country drive that delivered them to a place where they found community around like-minded people.
Upcoming Events
October 4 - Presentation on Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb at the 58th Western Literature Association Conference The Hilton Resort of El Conquistador, Tucson, Arizona.
October 15 - 7:00 PM, Vromen’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with The Lost Ladies of Lit Co-hosts Kim Askew and Amy Helmes,
October 16 - 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Bookmine in Napa.
October 18 - 7:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Copperfield’s Santa Rosa, CA - Register here.
October 23 - 5:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Readers’ Books 130 East Napa Street, Sonoma, CA.
October 30 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Harry Stecopoulos at Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA
November 1 - 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM - Catamaran Lit Chat with Iris Jamahl Dunkle - Catamaran Literary Reader - 1050 River St., Studio 118 Santa Cruz, CA 95060