Open Wednesday through Sunday 10am to 5pm
Join the National Steinbeck Center for an Author Night with Iris Jamahl Dunkle, featuring her novel Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb on Saturday, May 17, 2025, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. The evening will include a reading by the author, a book signing for guests who purchase their copy, and light refreshments. This is a FREE ticketed event and tickets will not be available at the door, so register for your free ticket today: Get Your Tickets Here
In 1939, when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation’s collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb. Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era’s literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison; entered into an illegal marriage; and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb’s field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb’s impact was profound. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns’s award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.
