enthusiasm for Cash, Blanche Knopf, the wife and partner of the magazine's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf of New York, invited Cash to submit a plan or manuscript for a book-length expansion of the article. In April 1930, with the help of University of North Carolina sociologist Howard W. Odum, Cash submitted a sketch of the proposed book, on the basis of which the Knopfs offered Cash a contract. Over the next 10 years, as Cash worked on the book, the Knopfs – who were known for their sharp instincts about up-and-coming writers – provided both encouragement and small monetary advances to keep him going. Shortly after he had submitted the sketch of The Mind of the South to the Knopfs, Cash had a physical collapse which prevented him from writing for two years, under doctors' orders to stop writing and get more outdoor exercise. In 1932, however, he began to write seriously again, using the unheated back room of the Boiling Springs Post Office, where his aunt was the postmistress. A perfectionists, he discarded more pages then he kept, but made progress; he also continued to do free-lance writing, despite his poor health, his lack of money, and his significant writer's blocks. After Cash had some success at The Charlotte News, he finally had the personal and professional confidence he had previously lacked, and his work there helped him to develop his unique style of writing. He also met and fell in love with Mary Bagley Ross Northrup (later known as Mary Maury), a divorced woman who also wrote for the paper, and who helped him to complete the book through his periods of depression, and his continued focus on events in Europe. During this period, Cash would listen to the news on the radio about the Anschluss with Austria, the invasion of Poland, or the fall of France and would pace around the room, biting his nails, hands, and wrists, leaving marks. He would become so upset that he would leave the house and walk the streets at night. Finally, on July 27, 1940, the last pages of the manuscript were finished and sent to New York. Five months later, on Christmas Eve, Cash and Northrup were married by a justice of the peace in York, South Carolina. On February 10, 1941, The Mind of the South was published by Knopf. The book, an intuitive socio-historical exploration of Southern