Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, tells an intimate story of Oklahoma Panhandle farmers in the 1930s who fought and fled drought and dust storms. Told with an empathy derived from the author's own firsthand experiences, this clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. Forced to abandon their fields and join the exodus to California, the Dunnes encounter an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The informal communal relations the dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb has recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those "whose names are unknown." In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress. Random House editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this "exceptionally fine" novel, but when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf concluded the market could not support both books.