The New Masses. Vol. 1 No. 5 September, 1926.

Contents: Cover by Frank Walts, The Brass Knuckles Santa Claus by Robert Dunn, Bertie, A Story by Ivan Beede, Message to Siberia A Poem by Alexander Pushkin Translated by Max Eastman, Five Poems by Kenneth Fearing, Diary of the British Strike by Raymond W. Postgate, In Spring A Poem by Whittaker Chambers, The Renegade Peasant by Michael Koltsov Translated by Bessie Weissman, Ida and Davie A Story by Libbian Benedict, Do the Churches Corrupt Youth by Samuel Ornitz, A Bunkless Movie by Edwin Seaver, Book Reviews by Harbor Allen, Powers Hapgood, John Dos Passos, Robert Dunn, James Rorty, Harry Freeman, McAlister Coleman, and Babette Deutsch. Art by Maurice Becker, Art Young, William Gropper, Otto Soglow, Stein, Adolph Dehn, Louis Lozowick, I. Klein, Wanda Gang, Hugo Gellert, Marty Lewis, and Xavier Guerrero.

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/1926/v01n05-sep-1926-New-Masses-2nd-rev.pdf