20 Facts About Grace Lumpkin

Grace Lumpkin was an American writer of proletarian literature who focused most of her works on the Depression era and the rise and fall of communism in the United States.

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.

Grace Lumpkin grew up in a very religious, prominent but economically-unstable aristocratic Georgian family.

Grace Lumpkin worked at a variety of jobs before graduating from Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia in 1911.

Grace Lumpkin volunteered in France for a year, and then returned to Georgia.

Grace Lumpkin's stay in the mountains introduced her to the families about which she wrote in her first novel.

Grace 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.

Grace 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 1927 Grace Lumpkin was arrested at a picket sponsored by the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee.

Grace Lumpkin first met Michael Intrator, a close friend of Chambers, who was very involved in the Communist movement, in the late 1920s.

The toughest crisis Grace Lumpkin experienced was her pregnancy with Intrator's child and decision to have an abortion, which she regretted, followed soon afterwards by divorce.

Close to the time of Chambers' defection from the Soviet underground, Grace Lumpkin began rejecting Communist Party functions; soon she became actively anti-Communist.

Grace Lumpkin became concerned with righting what she saw as her earlier political wrong and returned to the teachings of the Bible.

Grace Lumpkin became a frequent speaker in churches and joined the anti-Communist Christians.

Grace Lumpkin was then living on Gramercy Park in New York City and working as a proofreader for a printing firm called the Golden Eagle Press.

Grace Lumpkin continued writing and lecturing and kept her strong tie to the church until death.

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

Grace Lumpkin provides modern readers with a window into the past of the building of the southern working class and the changes to its patriarchal values and women's roles.

Grace Lumpkin's writings give cultural historians and scholars an important body to consider when considering this period and the movements to which she contributed.

Grace Lumpkin has received praise for her ability to portray the process in which "external forces shape a literary work".