His parents were Nanette Lutitia Hamrick, the organist at the local Baptist church who had previously taught music in the public school, and John William Cash, who managed the company store at the Limestone Mills.

He was educated at the local public school until he was 12, when his family moved to Boiling Springs, North Carolina, 14 miles away across the state border – his mother's home town – so that his father could become a partner with Cash's maternal grandfather in a general store there.

[2] The president of Wake Forest at the time was the controversial William Louis Poteat, whose liberal theological stance and espousal and teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution was disturbing to more conservative North Carolina Baptists who supported the school.

Poteat and others on the college's faculty encouraged Cash to challenge conventional orthodoxies, and under their tutelage, Cash turned away from enthusiasm for Southern writers such as Thomas Dixon Jr. – whose white supremacist novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) was the basis for D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation – and towards the work of authors such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henry Adams instead, as well as the ideas of Sigmund Freud.

After college, Cash served a 1923 summer apprenticeship as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, during which he covered a quickly-suppressed textile mill strike, a lynching, and other events which caused him to begin to see the South in a more critical way.

[7] 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.

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.

[6] 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.

[9] 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 received a payment of $3, equivalent to about $60-$65 in 2023.

Cash also wrote occasional editorials for the paper focusing primarily on the danger of Hitler and Mussolini to worldwide democracy, a topic on which he regularly expounded from 1935 and by the late 1930s would overtake his interest in the South and further delay completion of the book.

Despite his focus on the European situation, he also continued to explore local subjects such as health conditions in the Black communities of Charlotte, the violence and depravity of lynchings, and the poor quality of policing in the area, much to the dismay of city boosters, who protested the negative publicity.

He also reviewed favorably the writing which was emanating from the Harlem Renaissance in New York, as well as the new generation of Southern writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner,[11] as well as James Branch Cabell, Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay.

In October 1937, the strength of the freelance book reviews earned Cash a job as Associate Editor of the newspaper, which he held until May 1941, and which enabled him to move out of his parents' house.

A perfectionist, 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.

[2] 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.

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.

In March 1941, largely on the strength of the critical success of the book, Cash was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which included a small stipend which would allow him to spend a year writing a novel about the progress of three generations of a Southern cotton mill family, like his own, from the Old South into the modern era.

[16] Cash had always considered himself to be superior at writing fiction to non-fiction, as he stated in his October, 1940 application to the Guggenheim Foundation, and so he embraced with great eagerness the opportunity to try his hand at a novel for a year.

The Fellowship carried with it great prestige, Cash being placed in the select company of Daniels, Thomas Wolfe, and playwright Paul Green, as the only North Carolinians to have received the grant by 1941.

It has been praised by many scholars as the virtual bible on the origins of Southern culture and required reading for any serious student on the social history of the South and its conflicts through time.

[19] According to the biographer Bruce Clayton, the central themes in The Mind of the South were romanticism, violence, hyperbolic rhetoric, individualism, and white racial solidarity.

"Cash explored many tenacious paradoxes – the juxtaposition of class unity and class exploitation, individualism and the "savage ideal" of conformity, fundamentalist morality and the "hell-of-a-fellow complex" – and the complicated interrelationship of these with race, romanticism, rhetoric, leisure, the cult of womanhood (the "lily-pure maid of Astolat"), the rape complex, violence, paternalism, demagoguery, and suspicion of outsiders.

This myth, the standard Southern view of the era, has since been thoroughly destroyed by post-World War II scholarship, but there was sufficient evidence debunking it at the time Cash was writing the book if he had chosen to research the subject more completely, and was not blinded by his own prejudices.

[22][23] Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his introduction to the 1991 50th anniversary edition of the book, confirms some of Cash's oversights: [H]e knew nothing of the Charleston, New Orleans and Mobile antebellum planter-merchant classes and little about the sugar and cotton barons who established vast landed estates and built elaborate mansions along the lower Mississippi River.

[24]Even so, according to Wyatt-Brown, "Cash's major contribution is his exposition of Southern cultural and class patterns... [and] he also has important things to suggest regarding matters of gender and race.