A Sign for Cain

Published in the midst of the Great Depression, A Sign for Cain (1935) tells the tragic story of Dennis, a Black Communist who goes South to organize farmers and laborers across racial lines—but instead finds himself jailed for a crime he did not commit. Though Lumpkin later said she threaded Communist ideology into the novel because of party threats to her career, the novel’s strength lies in its powerful sense of justice.“An excellently constructed, often moving story of the death of a Communist organizer in the South, written by one of the ablest of U. S. radical novelists.” — Time MagazineAbout the Grace Lumpkin (1891-1980) was a radical author who wrote about racial inequality and oppression in the American South. Growing up in Georgia and North Carolina, where she witnessed the plight of sharecroppers and physical laborers, she organized adult night schools and became involved in the lives of farmers in the region. She moved to New York in 1925 and wrote for The World Tomorrow , covering the 1926 textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey. She became aligned with the American Communist Party and published her first story, “White Man, a Story,” in the New Masses in 1927. Her first novel, To Make My Bread (1932), made her a leftist literary star, a status she enjoyed until her break with Communism and return to religion in the late 1930s—a process she portrayed in her last novel, Full Circle (1962).