College in Georgetown, Kentucky, and at a high school in North Carolina, before experiencing a nervous collapse. Throughout his life, Cash suffered from manic depression or affective disorder, which manifested itself in breakdowns, periods of depression, fear of sexual impotency, and physical ailments such as not being able to swallow or choking when he spoke. He also suffered from a hyperthyroid condition, occasional alcoholism and excessive smoking. Cash usually referred to his condition as "neurasthenia". After his breakdown, at great strain on their finances, Cash's parents paid for him to take a bicycle tour of Europe –through England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium – during which he recovered. When he came back he turned permanently to journalism as his profession. Newspaper career From 1926 to 1928, Cash held several newspaper jobs: a year in Chicago writing for the now-defunct Chicago Evening Post; several months with The Charlotte News during which he wrote a wistful philosophical column titled "The Moving Row"; and a four-month stint during the fall of 1928 as the chief editor of a small semi-weekly newspaper, the Cleveland (County) Press, in Shelby, North Carolina, which he ran almost by himself. In his editorials for the paper, an increasingly liberal Cash excoriated the Ku Klux Klan, championed Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, a New Yorker, over Republican Herbert Hoover, and decried the anti-Catholic bias which animated Southern Democrats' loathing of Smith. Following Smith's defeat, Cash had another emotional breakdown, and the newspaper folded. Afterwards, Cash moved back into his parents' house in Boiling Springs – where he lived with his extended family, including his two brothers and their pregnant wives – and became a free-lance journalist, not easy to do in a busy and noisy household. He contributed to H. L. Mencken's The American Mercury magazine, and received encouragement from Mencken. From 1929 to 1935, Cash wrote eight articles about various aspects of the South, including one in October 1929 called "The Mind of the South", which would become the basis for the later book. During the period of primary writing on The Mind of the South (1929 to 1937), Cash continued to live with his parents in Boiling Springs. When his contributions to The American Mercury ended after Lawrence Spivak took over ownership of the magazine, Cash supported himself with freelance weekly book reviews to The Charlotte News from 1935 to 1939, for each of which he