Sanora Babb: “An Owl on Every Post”

Known for her evocative depictions of life in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, author Sanora Babb shares her family’s perpetual bouts with struggles against crop-failure, starvation, mortgage foreclosures, and loneliness in her memoir An Owl on Every Post. Experiencing pioneer life in a one-room dugout shelter, Babb viewed the land—which both tormented and beguiled her—from an up-close, eye-level perspective.

When her family relocated from the security of a small town to an isolated 320-acre farm on the western plains, the young Babb sought to find beauty and joy in her vast and desolate surroundings. The result of her introspection is a body of work that includes essays, short stories, poems, and five books.

In a new edition of her long-out-of-print memoir, An Owl on Every Post, Babb writes with immediacy and lyricism about growing up on the Colorado Plains. An Owl on Every Post reveals the values—courage, pride, determination, and love—that kept Babb’s family from despair and total ruin. The memoir, originally published in 1971, is now available with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author William Kennedy.

The Ransom Center holds the Sanora Babb papers, and some of the materials related to An Owl on Every Post are highlighted in the Center’s web exhibition Sanora Babb: Stories from the American High Plains.