Sanora Babb, who grew up in a dugout farming broomcorn in eastern Colorado, understood what it was like to grow up in poverty. That’s why she was drawn to write about the plight of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who were making their way to California in order to try and find work. In 1935, she began working for Tom Collins with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) at the migrant refugee camps and taking extensive notes for a novel she had begun about the plight of the migrants.
