Grace Lumpkin was born on March 3, 1891, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Around 1900 she moved with her family to South Carolina. Lumpkin was nine of eleven children born to Annette Caroline Morris and William Wallace Lumpkin. She grew up in a very religious, prominent but economically unstable aristocratic Georgian family.

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 their financial health suffered.

Lumpkin worked at a variety of jobs before graduating from Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, in 1911. 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 herself to the families that she wrote about 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 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. (Esther Shemitz married Whittaker Chambers.)

Lumpkin never officially joined the Communist Party, but she became a dedicated fellow traveler. In 1927 she was arrested at a picket sponsored by the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee . Then 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 party until she voluntarily left around 1939. The toughest crisis Lumpkin experienced in the mid- to late-1930s was her pregnancy with Intrator’s child and decision to have an abortion. Later Lumpkin regretted aborting her child and soon after their relationship ended.

In the late 1930s (close to the time of Chambers' defection from the Soviet underground), Lumpkin began rejecting Communist Party functions, and soon became actively anti-Communist. She became concerned with righting what she saw as her earlier political wrong, seeking the truth and went back to the teaching of the bible. Lumpkin became a frequent speaker in church circles and joined the anti-Communist Christians. All her later writings were devoted to exposing the evils of Communism. She continued writing, lecturing, and kept her strong tie to the church until her death in 1980 in Columbia, South Carolina.

To Make My Bread (1932). Tells the story of a family of Appalachian mountaineers who find themselves drawn to a Milltown nearby their family plot after suffering great economic adversity. Soon, all the characters become involved in the politics surrounding the exploitation of labor workers. Lumpkin based her work on the Gastonia textile strike of 1929 at Loray Mill, one of the most important labor strikes in United States history . Also considered an examination of cultural and feminist history during the depression, Lumpkin’s novel addresses many of the stratifications between class and race.

A Sign for Cain (1935). The novel follows an African American protagonist, Dennis, who dreams of organizing workers of all skin colors in order to stand together against business owners and others who wish to control them all, regardless of race. A Sign for Cain focuses on the struggle between newly freed blacks and their old owners. Issues with sharecropping and land ownership impact both races represented and talk of a social uprising rings in tones of communist revolution, a theme emerging as more prevalent in Lumpkin’s own life. Lumpkin realized the influence the communist party had over her writing and even claims that the strong implications evident in her text were driven by her own mentors in the party.

The Wedding (1939). The storyline follows the marriage ceremony of Jennie Middleton, the daughter of an aristocratic family that has ended up in ruin. The novel is set in 1909 and the families involved live strictly by the code of the Confederacy. Jennie’s groom is Dr. Gregg, a new member of the community, having moved to town due to its rising industrialization. The wedding is almost put on hold after a heated argument and it is only after her mother, father, and Gregg’s friend act as peacemakers that the wedding continues. Jennie conforms to society’s demands, having stood her ground for the last time against a marriage that has nothing to do with any sort of emotional relation with the doctor.

Full Circle (1962). Lumpkin’s final novel, explores her changing ideas regarding communism. She uses the Scottsboro case, and the characters involved, as an expose of the “evils of Communism” . The main character, Arnie Braxton, and her mother are slowly tempted into the world of Communist Party politics. Soon the two women find themselves rejecting bourgeois illusions, allowing the sacrilege of a Christ figurine, and deserting the rest of their family. Eventually, Arnie is ejected from the Communist party for racial prejudice. Throughout the text, Lumpkin describes the communist party in stark terms and points her novel towards Southern issues.

Starting around the 1950s and continuing to the present day, scholars have regained interest in the radical “lost novels” of the 1930s, and have pointed to Lumpkin as one of the time’s most influential authors. Lumpkin has been noted for both her historical and literary accomplishments; and is recognized particularly for her role as a prominent figure in the early feminist movement and in promoting worker’s rights. She has also received praise for her ability to portray the process in which "external forces shape a literary work". Recent literary scholarship has noted Lumpkin’s ideals of progressive representations of race relations, and have praised the way she incorporated this into her writings. The characters in To Make My Bread are a good example of this; they show the importance of alliances between white and black women workers, and how it can be one based on mutual understanding and need. Lumpkin shows readers that solidarity across racial and economic lines is essential for members of all groups. Historians during the 1960s-1970s were particularly interested in whether or not the United States should be run according to competitive individualism or by cooperation and mutuality, and looked to Lumpkin’s literature to study this argument. Lumpkin also provides modern readers with a window into the past of the building of the southern working class and the changing of its patriarchal values and women’s roles. Lumpkin’s writings give cultural historians and scholars an important body to consider when looking back to this time period and to the movements that she has contributed to.