Born in Oklahoma in 1907 to a restless small-town baseball player, gambler, and baker and his long-suffering wife, Sanora Babb and her sister lived as children on the arid and wind-swept prairie of eastern Colorado as their parents struggled vainly to homestead. As an adult, Babb worked for small-town newspapers and a farming magazine, as a country schoolteacher and as a college writing teacher. During the Great Depression she worked in the California...