Grace Lumpkin

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Grace Lumpkin (March 3, 1891 – March 23, 1980) was an American writer of proletarian literature, focusing most of her works on the Depression era and the rise and fall of favor surrounding communism in the United States.

Most important of four books was her first, To Make My Bread (1932), which won the Gorky Prize in 1933.

Early life

Grace Lumpkin was born on March 3, 1891, in Milledgeville, Georgia, the ninth of eleven children born to Annette Caroline Morris and William Wallace Lumpkin. In 1898 she moved with her family to South Carolina. She grew up in a very religious, prominent but economically unstable aristocratic Georgian family. There were seven siblings, who by birth order were: Elizabeth (teacher), Hope (clergyman), Alva (politician), Morris (lawyer), Grace (writer), and Katharine (academic).

In around 1910, William moved his family one final time, to a farm in Richland County. While in South Carolina, Grace witnessed firsthand the suffering of black and white sharecroppers and laborers. Black laborers performed fieldwork on the Lumpkin family farm, and the Lumpkin children attended school with white children from the "poorest classes". Just three months after the family began to farm, her father died and the family's financial health suffered.

Lumpkin worked at a variety of jobs before graduating from Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia in 1911. At Brenau, she was a member of Phi Mu and she wrote the author of the Phi Mu Creed. She volunteered in France for a year, and then returned to Georgia. In Georgia she worked for the YMCA, eventually organized an adult night school for farmers and their wives, and worked at home as a demonstration agent. During most of the summers she lived in the mountains of North Carolina, staying with mill workers, sharecroppers, and other laborers, which convinced her that these workers could better their lives only by means of trade unions. Her stay in the mountains introduced her to the families about which she wrote in her first novel.

Lumpkin had been publishing stories in college and other school magazines since 1908, but it was not until her mother's death, in 1925, that she decided to take seriously her career as a writer. Lumpkin moved to New York City when she was twenty-five and began to write short stories, becoming involved in liberal and radical politics. In the fall of 1925 she was hired as a member of the office staff at The World Tomorrow, one of the best selling magazines in New York. There she met Esther Shemitz, with whom she became lifelong friends. (Shemitz married Whittaker Chambers.)

In 1927 Lumpkin was arrested at a picket sponsored by the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee. She joined the staff of the New Masses in 1929, where she worked for "about a year and a half." In 1929 she was sent to the south by the Communist Party to organize among black sharecroppers and to observe and participate in the Communist-led Gastonia textile strikes.

Lumpkin first met Michael Intrator, a close friend of Chambers, who was very involved in the Communist movement, in the late 1920s. She and Intrator eventually became lovers. His expulsion from the Communist Party in 1929 brought a strain to their relationship as Grace remained part of the Communist milieu until the late 1930s. Lumpkin and Intrator married in 1931. The toughest crisis Lumpkin experienced (mid- to late-1930s) was her pregnancy with Intrator's child and decision to have an abortion, which she regretted, followed soon afterwards by divorce.

In the 1930s, Lumpkin's literary agent was Maxim Lieber, whom Chambers later named as part of his spy ring during that same period. Close to the time of Chambers' defection from the Soviet underground (April 1938), Lumpkin began rejecting Communist Party functions; soon she became actively anti-Communist.

Lumpkin became concerned with righting what she saw as her earlier political wrong and returned to the teachings of the Bible. She became a frequent speaker in churches and joined the anti-Communist Christians.

On April 2, 1953, Lumpkin testified before the Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. She was then living on Gramercy Park in New York City and working as a proofreader for a printing firm called the Golden Eagle Press. Asked about her affiliations in the 1930s, she replied, "I was under the influence and the discipline of the Communist movement, although I was not a member" and that she had taken part in "faction meetings and cell meetings."

Asked about why she broke away from the party's influence, she described the following incident.

Lumpkin devoted all later writings to criticism of Communism. She continued writing and lecturing and kept her strong tie to the church until death. She died in 1980 in Columbia, South Carolina.

In 2012, Lumpkin is a character in Walt Larimore's novels Hazel Creek and Sugar Fork.

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