New Masses was the principal periodical of the American cultural left from 1926 until 1938. The magazine featured reportage, poetry, art and fiction, and sponsored the John Reed Club, and American Writers and Artists Congresses. This digitised edition will feature a near-continuous range from issue 1 in May 1926, through to 1934. We encourage those with additional issues to contact us for collaboration, and would be happy to process high-resolution scans remotely for inclusion.

The New Masses editorial staff included Mike Gold, Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks, Walt Carmon, and James Rorty.

Regular contributors to the magazine were Max Eastman, William Carlos Williams, John L. Spivak, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Floyd Dell, Agnes Smedley, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Waldo Frank, Albert Maltz, Joseph North, Carl Sandburg, Ralph Ellison, James Agee, Alvah Bessie, Erskine Caldwell, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout, and Ernest Hemingway.

The characteristic artwork was created by Kenneth Fearing, H.H. Lewis, Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin, Jan Matulka, Ruth McKenney, Maxwell Bodenheim, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Jacob Burck, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Burnshaw, Louis Zukofsky, Art Young, George Oppen, Wanda Gag, Albert Halper, Al Hirschfeld, and William Gropper.