Grace Lumpkin

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Grace Lumpkin (1892–1980) is best remembered as an author in the tradition of proletarian literature who eventually became an ardent anti-communist.

Lumpkin was born in Milledgeville, Georgia to an affluent family and grew up there and in South Carolina. Her brother, Alva M. Lumpkin, was a U.S. Senator, and her sister, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, became a sociologist and well-known author. Although she was raised in a church-going household, she lost her faith during the 1920s and moved leftward politically. Moving to New York City in 1924, she wrote for The World Tomorrow, a religious social justice newspaper. Her first novel, To Make My Bread, was published in 1932 and marked her as an important Communist sympathizer in New York literary circles. She knew many of the leading literary critics of her day and was the roommate of Esther Shemitz, who later married Whittaker Chambers. Her 1936 interview in FIGHT against War and Fascism with the fascist Seward Collins, publisher of The American Review, proved embarrassing to many who had published in that periodical, as Collins boldly voiced his enthusiasm for Mussolini and Hitler and called himself a fascist.

Lumpkin's friends knew her as a fellow traveller of the Communist Party and a frequenter of the John Reed Club. Her marriage to Mike Intrator lasted from 1931 until 1941. Her anti-communist activities later in life included testimony before U.S. Senate committees investigating suspected Communist activity as well as public speaking engagements to warn of the dangers of communism.

In addition to To Make My Bread, Lumpkin also wrote: A Sign for Cain in 1935; The Wedding in 1939; and Full Circle in 1962.

[edit] References

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Imagination," Journal of Southern History 69 (February 2003):3-38.