Join co-hosts Anne Moore and Chris Stacey for an innovative, exciting, and passionate approach to world literature. Our current city is Los Angeles in the 1930s. Our third selection is Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown. The Dunne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The informal communal relations these 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 Dunne’s join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest.

Available Seats: There are 5 seats available as of November 6, 2026.

Club Member Registration: The book club is exclusively for club members. Here is a list of club members: CUCC Club Members.

If you are not a club member, join and we'll see you at the book club: Become a Club Member.

Non-Club Members Wait List: All registrants who are not club members are placed on a wait list. You are contacted if any seats are available after club member registration.

Date: Thursday, February 4, 2027

Social Hour: 5:00pm

Book Club: 6:00PM Central

Location: Private room. Club on Michigan Avenue.

Reviews

Babb puts a human face on the “Okies” and others who faced economic and social disaster, yet managed to retain their humanness, faith, and inner dignity. Is it better that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath? I think so, but you be the judge” –Mike Nobles, Tulsa World

“As vibrant and timely today as when it was begun in the migrant camps of California, Sanora Babb’s first novel depicts the pride, suffering, and resilience of uprooted Anglo farmers who confront economic and ecological disaster. Resisting forces within society that devalue and marginalize them, the declassed refugees work together to form enduring communities.” –Douglas Wixson, author of Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1869

"Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown has enjoyed an underground reputation for many years among those scholars who have known of its existence. Babb is a skillful artist who identified wholeheartedly with the ordeal of the dispossessed during the 1930s. The recovery of her novel is a miraculous gift that will play an important part in future reconsiderations of mid-century U.S. literature." –Alan M. Wald, author of Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left