Born in Oklahoma in 1907 to a restless small-town baseball player, gambler, and baker and his long-suffering wife, Sanora Babb and her sister lived as children on the arid and wind-swept prairie of eastern Colorado as their parents struggled vainly to homestead.

As an adult, Babb worked for small-town newspapers and a farming magazine, as a country schoolteacher and as a college writing teacher. During the Great Depression she worked in the California fields setting up government camps for migrant workers. She also traveled extensively with her cinematographer husband James Wong Howe, living on film locations throughout the world.

Babb mined and transformed all of this and more in her novels and stories. Two of the stories collected here, "The Santa Ana" and "The Wild Flower," have been widely anthologized. Two others, "Cry of the Tinamou" and "Davy," were written specifically for this volume.