In 1938, when refugees fleeing the ravages of the Dust Bowl poured into California’s Central Valley, Sanora Babb worked in the migrant camps, setting up tents, planning dances, taking their children to makeshift clinics.

As a journalist volunteering for the country’s Farm Security Administration, she also interviewed hundreds of families, gathering stories of almost unbelievable hardship. Babb understood all too well what they were going through: She had experienced many of the same privations, from starvation to temporary homelessness.

Her days were spent among the migrants. At night, she used her notes to finish a novel for Random House that she had been working on for four years — a story of two families who fled the Dust Bowl for California.

In May of that year, John Steinbeck, fresh off the success of “Of Mice and Men,” came to visit Tom Collins, a camp manager and Babb’s boss. Hoping that Steinbeck might write something to call attention to the plight of the refugees — a magazine article, perhaps, as he had done in the past — Collins asked Babb to hand him a copy of her field notes. She did.

In April 1939, Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” drawing liberally from those notes. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the first few months, and would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize. It is dedicated to Steinbeck’s wife — and to Collins, “who lived it.”

Months later, when Babb delivered her own finished manuscript to her editor, Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, he called her into his office. Her contract had been canceled, he said. Why would anyone read Babb’s novel, after all, when they had “The Grapes of Wrath”?

This tale of repurposed notes and a long-lost novel resonated with Iris Jamahl Dunkle, a poet and biographer whose own grandmother had lived through the Dust Bowl. She first heard about Babb while watching the Ken Burns documentary series “The Dust Bowl,” which gives a sketch of Babb’s life and her novel’s undoing. A little research showed that Babb had been a poet, too. Dunkle then devoured Babb’s novel, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” which had finally been released in 2004, a year before Babb’s death.

Dunkle had to know more. The result, “Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb,” is an exhaustively researched biography published by the University of California Press on Oct. 15. And although Steinbeck provides the book’s biggest hook — his use of Babb’s notes, extensively cataloged by Steinbeck scholars, is well documented in the book — there was much more to Babb’s life and career, Dunkle discovered.

Babb was born in Leavenworth, Kansas; her father abused her mother, and was an itinerant gambler, forcing the family to move from place to place, often in abject poverty. In eastern Colorado, Babb and her family lived for months in a dank, bedbug-ridden dugout; she learned to read from the old newspapers pasted to the dirt walls. During a particularly tough period, the family drank “red pepper tea” for a week to stave off hunger.

“Babb understood what it meant not to be able to feed your family,” Dunkle said. “That would make all the difference in her writing.”

Despite her spotty education, Babb became the valedictorian of her high school in Forgan, Oklahoma, only to see the honor revoked on the day of commencement because some of the town’s ministers balked at giving such an honor to a daughter of a shiftless cardsharp. When Dunkle came upon Babb’s writings about the incident, “I almost cried,” she said. “I could feel her shame.”

Babb became a respected writer and journalist, producing everything from newspaper articles and radio scripts to poems, short stories and novels. “Her writing is incredible,” Dunkle said. “She approaches her writing like a poet.”

Over the years, she befriended and worked alongside some of her generation’s most acclaimed literary lights, from Ray Bradbury, a longtime writer’s group colleague, to Ralph Ellison, with whom she had a passionate affair in the 1940s. Other close companions included William Saroyan, Carlos Bulosan and Richard Wright.

When Babb moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to find a newspaper job, legendary Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg, struck by her beauty, pursued her, hoping she would be his next star. She eventually married James Wong Howe, an Oscar-winning Chinese American cinematographer, after California cleared the path for such a union by overturning its anti-miscegenation laws in 1948.

Despite her accomplishments and the circles she ran in, few have heard of Sanora Babb. First, Dunkle said, there was the decades-long hold on her Dust Bowl novel. Babb was also largely written out of the life stories of many of her famous literary peers. “In those biographies about Saroyan, Bulosan, Fante, there’s no mention of Babb,” Dunkle said.

One big reason: Babb, like many others, was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the 1940s and ultimately blacklisted as a communist, Dunkle said.

To fill in the gaps of Babb’s story, Dunkle tracked down her letters and writings, searching various special collections, including those at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, where she learned about Babb’s time with Howe, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, home of the Sanora Babb papers.

Dunkle visited the Ransom Center two or three times a year as she was writing her book, poring through the collection’s 71 boxes of letters, scrapbooks and manuscripts drafts, recalled Amy Wagner, the center’s public services librarian.

“One thing I learned about Iris over the years is that she’s very passionate about lost voices, ones that maybe haven’t gotten the same popularity or attention as other authors and creators,” she said.

Dunkle also interviewed Babb’s friends and visited places where the author had lived. She traveled to Red Rock, Oklahoma, where Babb had spent her earliest years, and eastern Colorado, where Babb and her family had lived in a dugout, an experience Babb would return to often in her writings. “Just like her, I’m someone who needs sensory input in order to write a scene,” she said.

In one of the book’s most moving sections, Dunkle describes how Steinbeck beat Babb to the literary punch. While Babb was still working at the camps in 1938, she writes, Steinbeck went to work on his novel, famously cranking out “The Grapes of Wrath” in 100 days.

“She didn’t want to leave until she had finished her work there,” Dunkle said of Babb. “So she delayed taking the train to New York and finishing the novel.”

Although Cerf bumped Babb’s book because he felt that two Dust Bowl books was one too many, “the bitter irony is that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ isn’t a Dust Bowl book,” said Dayton Duncan, the writer and producer of the documentary “The Dust Bowl.”

“The Joads were from Oklahoma, but they were from eastern Oklahoma, so they weren’t dusted out,” he said. “Their cotton fields were being crushed by drought and the Depression.”

Steinbeck had been Dunkle’s favorite writer growing up, she recalled, and she had loved reading “The Grapes of Wrath” in high school.

“But when I told my grandmother that I had read that book, a book about our people, she said she hated it,” Dunkle said. “She hated Steinbeck’s version, and I never really understood why.”

Reading Babb’s book, Dunkle began to understand. Her grandmother hated being looked upon as a victim, which is how she felt Steinbeck had portrayed the Dust Bowl refugees. In Babb’s book, Dunkle discovered a writer who knew the migrants and their experiences far more intimately than Steinbeck ever could, and whose novel begins long before their lives are upended by the Dust Bowl.

“We get to see these people in Oklahoma and in the Panhandle before the dust storms hit,” Dunkle said. “And so when they hit, you have empathy and compassion for them. You understand what it meant to lose everything.”