Grace Lumpkin Explained

Grace Lumpkin
Birth Date:March 3, 1891
Birth Place:Milledgeville, Georgia, U.S.
Death Place:Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.
Occupation:Writer, novelist
Language:English
Period:1930s, 1960s
Genre:Proletarian literature, Feminist literature
Subject:American social injustices
Notableworks:To Make My Bread (1932)
Spouse:Michael Intrator (div.)
Relatives:Katharine DuPre Lumpkin (sister)
Awards:Gorky Prize 1933

Grace Lumpkin (March 3, 1891 – March 23, 1980)[1] 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. The most important of four books was her first, To Make My Bread (1932), which won the Gorky Prize in 1933.[2] [3]

Biography

Early life

Grace Lumpkin was born on March 3, 1891, in Milledgeville, Georgia,[4] the ninth of eleven children born to Annette Caroline Morris and William Wallace Lumpkin. In 1898 she moved with her family to South Carolina.[5] 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).[6]

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".[5] 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.[1] [4] At Brenau, she was a member of Phi Mu and she wrote the author of the Phi Mu Creed.[7] 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.[4] 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.[5] Her stay in the mountains introduced her to the families about which she wrote in her first novel.

Communist years

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.[5] There she met Esther Shemitz, with whom she became lifelong friends. (Shemitz married Whittaker Chambers.)[8] In 1926 she walked the picket lines with Passaic textile strikers and wrote about it for New Masses.[9]

In 1927 Lumpkin was arrested at a picket sponsored by the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee.[5] She joined the staff of the New Masses in 1929, where she worked for "about a year and a half."[10] 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.[5]

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.[5]

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.

Later years

Lumpkin became concerned with righting what she saw as her earlier political wrong and returned to the teachings of the Bible.[5] She became a frequent speaker in churches and joined the anti-Communist Christians.[11]

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.

Works

Books:

Articles:

Legacy

In 1935, Albert Bein adapted To Make My Bread into the play Let Freedom Ring.[21]

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

Beginning in the 1950s, scholars regained interest in radical "lost novels" of the 1930s. They have pointed to Lumpkin as one of the period's most influential authors. They have noted both her historical and literary accomplishments, particularly prominent as a figure in the early feminist movement and for promoting worker's rights. She has received praise for her ability to portray the process in which "external forces shape a literary work".[5] she was only 22 when she made her first novel.Recent literary scholarship has noted Lumpkin's ideals of progressive representations of race relations and how she incorporated these into her writings. For example, the characters in To Make My Bread illustrate the importance of alliances between white and black women workers, and how these can be based on mutual understanding and need.[5] Lumpkin shows readers that solidarity across racial and economic lines is essential for members of all groups.

Historians during the 1960s and 1970s found particular interest in whether the United States run according to competitive individualism or by cooperation and mutuality. They looked to Lumpkin's literature to study this argument.

See also

Further resources

Notes and References

  1. Book: Baker. Bruce E.. Joseph M.. Flora. Vogel, Amber; Giemza, Bryan. Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary . July 14, 2010. 2006 . Louisiana State University Press. Baton Rouge, LA . 0-8071-3123-7 . 257–258 . Grace Lumpkin. https://books.google.com/books?id=xxd451POnpYC&q=Grace+Lumpkin+1980&pg=PA258.
  2. Book: Lee , Elizabeth Grace . Pilgrims' Progress: Southern Social Activists' Journey from Christianity to Communism During the 1920s and 1930s. North Carolina State University. 2017. 10 October 2018.
  3. Book: Lee , Elizabeth Grace . Pilgrims' Progress: Southern Social Activists' Journey from Christianity to Communism During the 1920s and 1930s. North Carolina State University. 2017. 10 October 2018.
  4. Encyclopedia: Grace Lumpkin (1891–1980). Sowinska, Suzanne. July 9, 2009. The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press. July 14, 2010.
  5. Book: Sowinska. Suzanne. Grace. Lumpkin. To Make My Bread. 1995. University of Illinois Press. Champaign, IL. 0-252-06501-8. Introduction. registration.
  6. Lumpkin. Katharine DuPre. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Interview with Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, August 4, 1974: Interview G-0034. Southern Oral History Program Collec-tion (#4007). oral history. 4 August 1974. Documenting the American South . Chapel Hill, NC. 20-22. 10 April 2022.
  7. The Aglaia of Phi Mu, Vol. 14, p. 65.
  8. Book: Chambers , Whittaker . Witness . registration . Random House . 1952 . 0-89526-571-0 . 50, 61, 232, 265–266, 396.
  9. Lumpkin . Grace . God Save the State! . New Masses . June 1926 . 1 . 2 . 11.
  10. Web site: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations . April 2, 1953 . 12 November 2011 .
  11. Lumpkin Family History at Root Cellar
  12. "June 1929 – Strike at Loray Mill." UNC University Libraries. October 19, 2009. http://www.lib.unc.edu/ncc/ref/nchistory/jun2004/
  13. "To Make My Bread." University of Illinois Press. The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 15 October 2009. http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/44dyt2qp9780252065019.html
  14. "Grace Lumpkin." Center for Working-Class Studies. Youngstown State University, Ohio. 14 October 2009.
  15. "The Wedding (Lost American Fiction)." Paper Back Swap. http://www.paperbackswap.com/book/details/9780809307678-The+Wedding+Lost+American+Fiction
  16. "Books: Bride's Strike." Time magazine. 15 October 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20121021195328/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,788987,00.html?promoid=googlep
  17. Book: Miller, James A. . Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial . 2009 . Princeton University Press . 978-0-691-14047-6 . en.
  18. Grace. Lumpkin. Grace Lumpkin. White Man, A Story. New Masses. September 1927. 7. 13 May 2020.
  19. Grace. Lumpkin. Grace Lumpkin. 'Flaming Milka's' Story. New Masses. February 1928. 5. 13 May 2020.
  20. Grace. Lumpkin. Grace Lumpkin. The Law and the Spirit. National Review. 25 May 1957.
  21. Web site: xxx. Playbill. 6 June 2019.
  22. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Imagination",Journal of Southern History 69 (February 2003):3-38

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