Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was born into a prominent Georgia family and raised in a southern society intent on preserving the economic and racial status quo. But as a young woman working with the poor in the sand hills of South Carolina, she began to question what she had been taught. In The Making of a Southerner, Lumpkin re-creates the South of her childhood and records the journey she took from her early instruction as a daughter of the "Lost Cause" to the liberal viewpoints she championed as an adult.