Of particular interest this issue Moissaye J. Olgin’s appreciation of Anatoly Lunacharsky on his death and Harry Gannes reporting from the Cuba, along with some fine art by New Masses regulars.

The New Masses. Vol. 10 No. 2. January 9, 1934.

Contents: The Second Five-Year Plan. Writing and War by Henri Barbusse, Poisons for People by Arthur Kallet, Union Buttons in Philly by Daniel Allen, “Zafra Libre!” by Harry Gannes, A New Deal in Trusts by David Ramsey, The House on 16th Street by Marguerite Young, Storm Warning by James Daly, Letters from America, Letters from a Princess, Comrade Lunacharsky by Moissaye J. Olgin, Books Reviews, Music by Ashley Pettis, The Theatre by William Gardener, The Screen by Nathan Adler, Art Calendar, ART BY Jacob Burck, Bernarda Bryson, Hyman Warsager, Limbach, Georges Schreiber, Julius Bloch, Adolf Dehn.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v10n02-jan-09-1934-NM.pdf