“L” is for Lumpkin, Grace [ca. 1896-1980]. After obtaining a teacher’s certificate from Brenau College, Lumpkin held various jobs in the Carolinas and France as a teacher, home demonstration agent, and social worker. She moved to New York in 1925 and took a job with The World Tomorrow, a pacifist Quaker publication. In 1932 she published her first novel, To Make My Bread, based on her observations of the 1929 textile strikes in Gastonia. The book won the 1932 Maxim Gorky Prize. Her second novel, A Sign for Cain, appeared during a period of speech-making and investigative work in the South on behalf of the Communist Party (which she never joined). In the late 1930s she joined an ardently anti-Communist organization, the Moral Re-Armament Movement. In 1953, Grace Lumpkin testified before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee about her political and literary activities.
“L” is for Lumpkin, Grace
