An Owl On Every Post

by Sanora Babb, William Kennedy (foreword)

Sanora Babb experienced pioneer life in a one-room dugout, eye-level with the land that supported, tormented and beguiled her; where her family fought for their lives against drought, crop-failure, starvation, and almost unfathomless loneliness. Learning to read from newspapers that lined the dugout's dirt walls, she grew up to be a journalist, then a writer of unforgettable books about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most notably Whose Names Are Unknown.The author was seven when her parents began to homestead an isolated 320-acre farm on the western plains. She tells the story through her eyes as a sensitive, fearless young girl who came to love the wind, the vastness, the mystery and magic in the ordinary. This evocative memoir of a pioneer childhood on the Great Plains is written with the lyricism and sensitivity that distinguishes all of Sanora Babb's writing. An Owl on Every Post, with its environmental disasters, extreme weather, mortgage foreclosures, and harsh living conditions, resonates as much today as when it first appeared. What this true story of Sanora's prairie childhood reveals best are the values--courage, pride, determination, and love--that allowed her family to prevail over total despair. This long, out-of-print memoir is reissued with new "On a par stylistically and thematically with Willa Cather's My Antonia, this is a classic that deserves to be rediscovered and cherished for years to come."--Linda Miller, English Professor at Penn State and chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board for The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway."An unsung masterpiece in the field of American autobiography--I was completely blown away. This memoir offers an unforgettable picture of pioneer life. Her ageless story deserves a permanent place in our nation's literature."--Arnold Rampersad, author of Ralph A Biography. About the AuthorSanora Babb is the author of five books, as well as numerous essays, short stories, and poems that were published in literary magazines alongside the work of William Saroyan, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, and William Carlos Williams. The author and her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was featured in the Ken Burns PBS documentary on The Dust Bowl.www.sanorababb.comEditorial Reviews "A wry, affectionate but unsentimental recall of frontiering struggles in Colorado just prior to WWI." - Kirkus"Masterly. Hers is a small song, and not grand opera. But hearing it is a significant and salutary experience."--London Times"The author has achieved a small miracle with this book for she has turned hunger, poverty, loneliness and depression into incomparable beauty by the magic of her writing." - The Pretoria News"Babb's engaging memoir recalls a childhood spent on the harsh and wild Colorado frontier during the early 1900s."--Publishers WeeklyOwl is novelist Babb's memories of her childhood in eastern Colorado and Kansas before World War I. LJ's reviewer found that “Babb wrote well, relating vividly and with fine and fond recollection" Library Journal 12/1/70.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Biography Memoir, Nature, Audiobook

245 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Sanora Babb was an American novelist, poet, and literary editor.

Reviews

[Dem · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Owl At Every Post is an engrossing and hypotonic read where nature and people try to live in harmony but the harsh and unforgiving environment of the prairie was a challenge for many of the early settlers.

Beautifully written where they sentences just flow with descriptive words and vivid images by the author who really brings the wild Colorado Frontier to life.

Sandra Babb's memoir recounts a childhood spent on the unforgiving and wild Colorado frontier during the early 1900s. A childhood spent in a one room dugout where her family spent every day surviving the drought, crop failures and above all the loneliness that went with Frontier living.

Beautifully written where not a word is wasted and you can feel the cold and the heat, the loneliness and yet the beauty of the environment. What wonderful fuel for any child and adults imagination. I really leaned a lot about the frontier from the wildlife to the changes in weather and the skills these folks used to survive the winters.

I listened to this one on audible and can highly recommend it as the narrator is excellent.

[Chrissie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having so loved the novel Whose Names Are Unknown I simply had to continue with the author's childhood autobiography. Her own experiences are the basis for what she wrote in both the novel and this novelistic memoir. Reading both is not repetitive, except for one chapter. The time periods covered are different. Very different stories are told

I loved this one even more, simply because it does NOT follow the so often told tale of the dust-bowl era and migrant workers in California. Others have written of this, as she did in Whose Names Are Unknown. It is in theme similar to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. What is here in this book feels one of a kind. Similar to and maybe even better than Willa Cather's My Antonia, another fantastic read. If you enjoyed that, you will certainly love this. This novelistic memoir covers her years from seven to twelve. It is written as a novel with dialog. Her sister, Dorothy, is called Marcy in the book. Here we get the author’s childhood years growing up on the Great Plains, on the prairie in Eastern Colorado and later in Kansas when her family moves eastward so that she and her sister could go to school. We are told this through her perspective. We see prairie life thorough a child’s eyes....and she loves the prairie. She feels at home with nature and animals. There is a bit of fantasy, she sees the ghost of a horse. I am left feeling that what she saw and experienced could have happened. Who am I to say her experience is false simply because I have never seen ghosts, let alone animal ghosts. It is all so perfectly told.

The writing - I love the writing. I like it as much as Cather's. I like it as much as Steinbeck's. Each writer is different and no two others can really be compared but there are similarities. Sanora Babb’s writing is gorgeous, lyrical, beautiful. Depictions of places and landscapes, relationships and emotions..... blue skies, the feel of air on your skin or the dark night sky of the prairie. You should read this book just to experience the writing.

I felt the relationships between the family members were expertly depicted, not described but instead seen by how they each behaved. The relationship between Sanora’s father and paternal grandfather was so honest, so pitch perfect with both conflict and love. It felt so real. Her mother and her sister were different in personality; each became for me a different identity.

Animals and nature are central to this book. Intuitively, even as a young child, the author felt at home there on the Great Plains. Horses and dogs and coyotes. Sanora's grandfather taught her so much. Not only about animals but also how to read - from his one book on Kit Carson and the newspapers plastered on the wall of their dug-out. Yes, that is where they lived, a groped out hole in the ground with the window at the level of the ground ….and the bugs. The rat. The scorpion. No well. A blizzard - five people living in a hole for days. No light. Let me just say this, the story is well told.

The book ends with an Afterword that quickly skims her years as a journalist, writer, teacher and working with the migrant workers in California in the 30s. It is amazing what she has done with her life, and it is amazing that it has taken so long for her writing to be acknowledged as it should have been years and years ago.

The audiobook narrator, Alyssa Bresnahan, is the same as in her other book. It is equally well read. Slowly and with feeling.

I cannot give this book anything but five stars.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely book about growing up on The Plains, in this case Eastern Colorado, mostly in the 1910s. Sanora Babb and her family were part of the overly optimistic homesteaders trying to scratch a living from a place that didn’t support their ambitions. It is written like a novel and is very beautiful. In spite of growing up with only her grandfather’s one book on Kit Carson she managed to work her way into journalism and writing fiction. She was later asked to gather notes on the dust bowl and to let John Steinbeck use her notes. He did, the result was Grapes of Wrath, and he didn’t credit her. Shame on you John Steinbeck!

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Another enrichment from our days on the plains that my sister and I share to this day is a sense of wonder as part of our love for nature. What may have appeared a desolation to others, certainly to our mother, never seemed so to us. In all that flat treeless grassland, there were modest wildflowers, rough weeds, and fragrant sagebrush many wild creatures, wolves, coyotes, wildcats, skunks, badgers, prairie dogs, snakes, birds, especially the meadowlarks with their nests on the ground and their beautiful songs.”

Sanora Babb’s memoir of her early years on the high plains of the Colorado frontier, in the 1910s, when she and her parents, sister, and grandfather lived in a one-room dugout shelter. Her father was restless and desired an independent life. He moved the family to from Oklahoma to Colorado to join his father in farming broomcorn. The family interactions are realistically drawn. The prose is evocative. It is a story of harsh weather, hunger, loneliness, and survival. I can also recommend Babb’s novel of the Great Depression: Whose Names Are Unknown.

[Soubhi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this memoir of a young girl brought up on the Colorado prairie. In this modern world, I think it's hard for most people to imagine a life so dependent on nature's whims.

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

So interesting to read about homesteading in Colorado. Sanora Babb is so descriptive with her writing that it really brings the Colorado prairie to life.

[Joni · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I feel like this is Little "Dugout" on the Prairie, a grown up's version of Little House on the Prairie. The story is told from oldest child, Cheyenne's, perspective. She's entranced by Southeast Colorado's people and landscape. Her family survives many trials, some I just couldn't imagine (five people living in a one-room dugout through the winter). The author suggests her childhood on the plains of Southeast Colorado created the woman she is today and that's a nice thought to end with.

[Silvia Amalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Long ago in “Owl Country” when I was seven or eight, one evening at dusk I was standing in the bare yard, looking over the great distance to the horizon, as I often did, wondering, dreaming. I recall thinking: one day I will lift up the sky and go into the world and wander all over that world.»

Un meraviglioso memoir di Sanora Babb sulla sua infanzia nelle Grandi Pianure: un’infanzia che potremmo definire “difficile”, sebbene non ci sia mai un momento in cui si lamenti della scarsità di cibo, delle continue avversità del maltempo o del bisogno di mettere radici in un luogo da chiamare “casa”. Però sì, la sua è stata a tutti gli effetti un’infanzia difficile.
Ho ritrovato parecchie analogie con “Whose Names Are Unknown”, come — banalmente — il nonno che si chiama Alonzo, la perdita del fratellino, e la famiglia che deve trasferirsi continuamente per cercare fortuna altrove.

Ormai ho capito che voglio recuperare tutte le altre opere di questa incredibile scrittrice.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new author for me...I'm currently reading her novel covering the same information as this memoir. A startling voice, filled with clarity and substance. She was THERE. She grew up in a one-room dugout with her parents, her sister, and her grandfather. She watched weather take the crops...she knew the hunger. The deprivation. The longing for just one piece of penny-candy. She knew. She collected those images of long fences, with a watchful owl on every post.

She, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, was shuttled around the country by a restless father who finally ended up as the gambler he'd always been.

Written in the voice of the child she was, Babb does an excellent job of limiting what little Sanora understood. Her mother's miscarriage, in that one-room dugout, with no privacy, no doctor, and no other woman, is just a bit beyond the comprehension of Sanora and her younger sister.

NOW I'm reading her novel, based on this same experience. I'm so grateful I read the memoir first, because I can see how this gifted author uses memory and images to create fiction storytelling.

Some critics think her novel, Whose Names are Unknown, is a better book than Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath...but suffered the misfortune of going to editors after...it wasn't published until 2004.

This would be an excellent book to pair with GoW in a classroom...a female voice added to the literature is always important.

[༺Kiki༻ · Rating 5 out of 5]

You might also enjoy:

✱ Whose Names Are Unknown (my review)
✱ The Worst Hard Time
✱ The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History
✱ Cotton Tenants: Three Families

[Marie Belcredi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminded me of the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy in its evocative descriptions of the plains landscape but as seen with the eyes of a young girl.
Sanora was seven when her parents took her out onto the wide plains of the US at the beginning of the 20th century. I read this book with a map in one hand, internet and book in the other to help me visualise life in a dugout or the infinite plains of the country where she lived.
Sanora's mother was 15 (!) when she married but showed a stoic fortitude to all she had to bear living dirt-poor with her family and her father-in-law in a one room dugout. There the family had to deal with starvation and the ever present risk of the weather which was always changing but mostly extreme as the wide plains offered no protection.
The two children received no formal education whilst living in their homestead but their father and grandfather taught them what they had in their heads, from the old newspapers that lined the walls of the dugout and from the only book they had which was the Adventures of Kit Carson.
Although always hungry, Sanora never lost the wonder of the nature around them. From the uninterrupted view of the stars above to the insect life that they could watch from the window of their dugout and the loosened roots of the ground which would one day cause land degradation, Sanora describes all with love and wonder.
I have now ordered Whose Names are Unknown as I'm so sad to have finished the book. Thank You New York Review of Books for recommending Sanora Babb.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is a love poem to the western Great Plains, a memoir, and a naturalist's description of southwestern Colorado at the turn of the last century. It should almost be considered non-fiction because of the wonderful descriptions of the area. The book is particularly interesting for me because my grandmother experienced much of what the narrator did. (My grandmother grew up in the panhandle of Oklahoma, less than 100 miles from the location of the novel at the same time.)

Now I really appreciate why my grandmother loved the western Great Plains. To me it's just a windswept near-desert, but she saw all the local wildlife before the farms obliterated most of it.

This book was recommended by Joy D. some months ago. Good job Joy!
3 stars, good solid writing and story.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m so glad I discovered this author from the 1930s. This is a memoir written in a very novelish (not a word but I’m creating it) way about very primitive life on the frontier of the high plains of eastern Colorado in the lead-up to WWI. She writes about her life from age 7 to 11 living in a below ground one-room dugout with a family of 5, and, while that just seems totally unimaginable, she wrote in such a way that you can feel all the love she had for the adventures, the wide open country, and her family despite their extreme hardships and poverty. Lovely book. 4.5 stars rounded down only in comparison to her novel I just read, Whose Names Are Unknown, a book about the Dust Bowl and migration to California, who many think rivals the quality of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (and I agree!). I recommend reading that one first.

[CHM · Rating 5 out of 5]

All it needs is water they say.
Brings the SE CO plains and the people scratching the dirt to life. "Right here, now, if we plow up all this grassland....there'll be a hard price to pay".

You can hear and feel the wind, the scorching droughts, the blizzards, smell the rain.
4.5

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read, written by one of the original homesteaders in Colorado. By no means is this a gripping, page-turner. But, if you know what you’re heading into, it is brutally honest and beautifully written. Methodical, as were their lives. Reading her prose I felt as if I could almost hear the prairie noises in the night.

[Stacie Haden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written and shines in it's simplicity.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The language she uses to write about the plains where I grew up are beyond poetic. The reality and harshness and truth of growing up as she did come through very clear. This is a book that will stay with me for years to come.

[Karen Marcum · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Cheyenne was seven, and her sister five, their family moved, from Indian country in Oklahoma to Colorado, to join her grandfather on his homestead claim. It was 1913. Life on grandfather’s claim on the high plains was hard.

Now there were five people living in a small one room dugout. The weather was harsh and the crops failed almost every year. They had little money and sometimes no food. Their education came from one book and the newspapers which lined the interior walls of the dugout.

My childhood reading was marked by the Laura Ingalls Wilder books which I read over and over again, thanks to my third grade teacher who read the first three books to my class. An Owl on Every Post brings me back to them, but Sanora Babb’s book is much more realistic. Her childhood is filled with the pressures of people living too close together, not always agreeing and the resulting conflicts.

While An Owl on Every Post is a novel, it is very autobiographical of Sanora Babb’s childhood. Her life story is an amazing one of living a life of writing despite being deprived of them as a child. I loved the almost lyrical language of this book.

I had never heard of broom corn before, which Cheyenne’s family plants. It is a grass with woody stems which are used to make…brooms!

Cheyenne’s story is a strong addition to the growing collection about people trying to survive in America’s Dust Bowl era.

I listened to the audio book which was narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan. Because it is the story of a young woman it needed a younger sounding voice than Bresnahan’s.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brilliant memoir is written in first person in the voice of the author as a child. Sonora Babb cleverly intertwines adult description with the impression of an 8-12-year-old girl. The setting on the plains of Colorado in the early 1900s is bleak. A family of five, three adults and two young girls, living in a one-room dugout, literally a hole in the ground, is a gritty form of survival. Still, our young narrator finds beauty in nature that she is living with so intimately. She even likes the earthy smell of the worms at eye level from her dugout window. She is in the room when her mother is giving birth to a stillborn. She helps spread the bones when old Fred, one of the plow horses dies. She loves being so close to life, death, and the constant changes in nature. This book is a beautiful example of nature writing at its best. Breathe deeply of what from a distance seem to be barren plains that stretch to the horizon letting your mind float free. Up close, they are pulsing with life. Yipping coyotes, howling wolves, birds singing in the morning, and snakes. Lots of snakes, and don’t forget the wildflowers in spring. All joyous creatures to young Sanora born in 1907.

[Anni Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that radiates a warmth that doesn't let you go. The world of the narrator Sanora Babb in the drought-ravaged Great Plains just before World War I breaks out is one of failure, hunger, drought and hardship, but at the same time one of wonder, discovery, human relationships and happiness, all told with a minimum of sentimentality. Babb's descriptions let you feel the winter cold, the dust and summer heat, hear the coyote's howling and the mockingbirds, and smell the prairie flowers. The story is told with such honesty, you can forgive the funny little scenes, like the one with the Grandfather's dead horse Daft, without them bruising the rest of the story.
It's a life lived on the wide prairies of eastern Colorado, where the people have to watch out for tarantulas and rattle snakes and where they consider animals like wolves and coyotes to be part of life that shouldn't be killed or injured. What a refreshing contrast to today's throwaway society.
A very readable book, five stars!

[Tabitha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. Sanora Babb vividly described living and farming on the Eastern Colorado prairie in the 1910s.
Her father moved the family there to live in a one room dugout in the earth when she was seven. They spent four years farming the prairie. The only source of water was the nearby creek. There was no irrigation for the crops.
The area was open, wild land that was sparsely populated. She describes how the family struggled to survive and farm in a harsh climate that was not really meant for farming. She also describes the beauty and awe of the open plains and the natural world she grew up in - in addition to the hardship there was joy and beauty.
She also captures the loneliness of the place and how that was harder than the poverty and lack of food.
Babb’s writing is very descriptive. She was able to capture and describe the largeness and power of the natural world and how she and her family connected with it. The story was also an interesting snippet of American history - it described the last of the homesteaders.

[Susan Eubank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are the questions we discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussion on March 26, 2025.

Here are the questions we discussed on March 26, 2025:
Ice Breaker: Tell about a time when isolation and/or crowding was a part of your life.
What do you think about the writing style? What is the best part of the author's writing?
Why did the author frame the story in the voice of a child? Was it successful? Why? Why not?
Who do you think the audience for this book originally was? Why?
What did you think about the chapter about Daft?
What did you learn from this book?
Does this book help us understand our own time? Why? Why not?
Any ambiguities we need to clear up? If not, why not?
Favorite line, image or passage?

[Marilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir by Sanora (Cheyenne) Babb covers several years of her childhood, starting at age 7 (~1914) when her family moves to a very arid area of Eastern Colorado to "farm". Let's just say it's a very hard life, living in a one room dugout for a family of five, hauling water from two miles away. Cheyenne is close to her grandfather, who shares his love of the wide, open land and its inhabitants with her. I grew up in Oklahoma years after Babb, and although I didn't live in the panhandle, this big sky story resonated with me. It's amazing to think what Babb lived through from life in a dugout (with only one book - and it was not the Bible) to becoming a published author who lived in Hollywood and traveled the world. I thank Phinney Books in Seattle for this recommendation.

[Peg Lotvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A just plain wonderful book! Written, like the Little House books, years after the actual events. Sanora Babb's memories seem a bit more "on the level" than Laura Wilder's memories. Her family follows her father's father to a dugout home in southern Colorado right at the end of the nineteenth century. Travel is still mostly by horse and wagon, poverty rules the lives of the people who have left lives of somewhat security for the (false) promise of nearly free land. The grandfather can't leave his property as he is still "proving" it up. His son's family of four come to live with him in the dugout making things even harder. Young Sanora takes it all in at the time and remembers it all later to put it down in a fascinating book.

[Jean Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wondrous reading experience! I am so happy to have discovered Sanora Babb. Thank you, Joanne Dearcopp (friend and Greenwich Pen Women colleague), for introducing me to her. How better to describe Babb's masterful half memoir/half lyrical novel than to quote from the William Kennedy Forward: "Fate was excessively unfair to Sanora Babb, a woman born in 1907, raised in a family whose home was a dugout on the Great Plains, living on the edge of starvation...but growing up to be a writer of unforgettable books." Truly an unforgettable read. Next for me is her all but forgotten literary masterpiece of the dustbowl, her novel: whose names are unknown.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this author after watching Ken Burns' PBS series on the Dust Bowl. This is Babb's memoir of living as a young child on the high plains of Oklahoma and Kansas, which were some of the hardest hit areas during the depression and environmental crisis.
Babb writes with an observant and elegant literary style.
And how can one not help but be intrigued by this title and cover?!
I'll be reading her dust bowl novel - Whose Names Are Unknown - next. There is quite a story about getting that novel published, by the way!

[JMK · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir was incredibly depressing, and surprisingly beautiful. The prose is beautiful, and although their lives were harrowing, it seemed that they found a lot of joy in their little corner of the plains.

It begins in 1913 with the author and her family moving to the plains of Southeast Colorado to homestead. What follows is a sad, harrowing story of years lived in a harsh and hostile environment.

It’s a story of growth, resilience, survival and strength. This family fought everyday just to live.

It’s short, but man was I sad for them the entire time.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

" 'Once, when I was a Socialist, I threw my Bible away. I was afire with Socialism; you won't understand that now. I thought they had the answers to all the injustice of the world, but of course no one has.' "

"I wasn't sure what war meant, but it seemed oddly a gay occasion for bands, urgent songs, the excitement of new adventure. And killing. I could not kill a grasshopper. He had eyes, he looked at me, and his eyes said: 'This is my life.' I respected that."

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her descriptions of daily life are gems. The chapters are short and just right for a quick read before bed. There is nothing dark or cruel in this memoir. It’s just a beautiful tale from another age about a close knit, proud and resilient family. They are kind to one another and to all creatures. It made me nostalgic. And I am looking forward to reading her dust bowl refugee novel “Whose Names are Unknown”.