Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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I have never even once heard this accusation. I skimmed his Wikipedia article and didn't see a reference to any of this.

Is there clear plagiarism? The Great Depression wasn't exactly an obscure topic and was still fresh in the minds of many people at the time.

What is going on? Is this posthumous cancel culture?

Wasn't it prudent to look for similar media and clear the wake? Publishing was a smaller, more difficult world back then and publishers wouldn't back two of the same thing.

Wouldn't you drum up support for the novel you worked on? Especially after having struggled for years as a manual laborer trying to make it? Would you willingly table your book that you worked on so that someone else could take your place?

Is that malice?

Unless there's clear evidence, it's like saying Marvel plagiarizes DC. And that Disney should be cancelled for scheduling their movie premieres around the best moviegoing dates. (Is that highly competitive? Sure. Evil? no...?)

The reason you’ve never heard of this accusation is because it was Babb who was wrongly “cancelled” soon after she wrote her novel. She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.

Regardless, I think it’s odd you find something utterly unbelievable simply because you haven’t heard it until today. Surely the entire internet is full of true things that you, and I, and most people have never heard of? Not having heard a piece of information before doesn’t make it any less credible.

Good points.

> She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.

That's awful. :(

the original comment is itself perhaps over-confident in its accusation. as far as i can tell, the known facts about what materials steinbeck received of babb's are hazy. certainly seems suspicious though.

It's still illegal for a white woman to marry an Asian man if she's already married to a white man. Still awful. I'm just making a point that these social norms are pretty relative and if you don't have any underlying system of morals to judge them by, you'll probably just end up reinforcing whatever morals your own society already has, with no regard to their awfulness.

Also her leftist tie was derived from her marriage to a Chinese man:

""" Howe met his wife, a white woman named Sanora Babb, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, after the law banning interracial marriage was abolished.[5][13] Due to the ban, the "morals clause" in Howe's studio contracts prohibited him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Babb. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building.[14]

During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Babb was blacklisted due to supposedly having Communist ties from her marriage to Howe; she moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from racial harassment.[5][15]

Howe raised his godson, producer and director Martin Fong after Fong arrived in the United States. """

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wong_Howe

That's so awful. It hurts to think about the pain she and her husband, let alone families like hers had to endure.

I'm sorry for my tone. I had no idea.

Don't be, we all are learning. Nothing was set in stone. Even words carved on stone can erode and change.

Answers to your questions might be in the Smithsonian mag article here:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/forgotten-dust-b...

This is why famously many artists will REFUSE to look at any unpublished works and why places like Disney will return scripts unread, etc.

> I have never even once heard this accusation.

There's some information in the William Souder Biography of Steinbeck that came out last year. Though it wasn't presented as a clear-cut case of plagiarism there were definitely questions. He'd apparently had access to her manuscript for "Whose Names are Unknown" and he and Babb were traveling the migrant worker camps in Central California working on stories for various publications. They did appear to cross paths. I've yet to read "Whose Names are Unknown" to see how similar it might or might not be to "Grapes of Wrath".

It is mentioned on The Grapes of Wrath wiki page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath#Similariti...

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