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Sanora Babb' s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate history of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dirt storms during the Great Despair. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is situated upon the author' s firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental history centers on the fictional Dunne family as they battle to survive and undergo while never losing beliefs in themselves. Inside the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt' s daddy, Konkie, show a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to consume. Yet buried in the drudgery with their everyday life are dreams, failed dreams, and fleeting occasions of trust. The land is their desire. The Duanne family and the farmers around them struggle frantically for the land they love, however the droughts of the thirties drive them to get away from their fields. When they become a member of the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labeling all farmers like them as worthless " Okies" and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking women and men, such as Milt and Julia, subject to pay so low they can' t possibly supply their children. The casual communal relationships these dryland farmers realized on the High Plains little by little coalesce into a distributed determination to resist. Realizing a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes become a member of with their fellow workers and begin the battle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic firm and collective protest.
