New Masses. Vol. 18 No. 13. March 24, 1936.

Contents: Editorial Comment, An Historic Opportunity, Can Britain Keep Peace? by John Strachey, Smash the Sedition Bills, Seymour Waldman, God and the Gorillas by Dale Kramer, They Killed My Son by Harrison George, Chain Gangs in Palestine by Ellis Sax, Our Readers’ Forum, MacLeish and the Critics by Isidor Schneider, Round the Elephant and Back Again by Jack Conroy, The Novel That Came Too Late by Louis Ferris, Duranty and the U.S.S.R. by Paul Novick, Walter Quirt by Charmion Von Wiegand, Hirsch Lekert by Nathaniel Buchwald, The Screen by Kenneth Fearing, Between Ourselves, Drawings by Russell T. Limbach, William Gropper, Scott Johnson, Serrano, Mackey, reproduction of paintings by Walter Quirt and Eitaro Ishigaki.

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/1936/v18n13-mar-24-1936-NM.pdf