The Lost Traveler

This is a first: the first time we've chosen an author twice for our Phinney by Post subscription service. Babb's memoir of her childhood on an unfertile Colorado farm, An Owl on Every Post, has been one of our most popular recent selections, and now we're presenting a book about her teen years, when her dreaming and scheming father tried to support the family as a professional gambler in small-town Kansas. It was published earlier, as fiction, and it's a darker story, but it makes a fascinating pair with An Owl as two portraits of a family struggling to survive together and destined to break apart. And together they reveal Babb as a great 20th-century American writer who is just now finally starting to get her due in the 21st century.