Joseph Freeman is best known as a journalist, autobiographer, and exponent of Marxist literary and cultural criticism. As a founding editor of The New Masses and the Partisan Review, he played an important role in the development of the American cultural Left in the 1920s and 1930s; his best-known book, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (1936), was at once a detailed record of that period and an intimate account of the coming of age of a radical intellectual. As Kent M. Beck writes in "The Odyssey of Joseph Freeman" (Historian, November 1974), "In the uncertain history of the American left," Freeman "was both participant and commentator, activist and dissenter, zealot and critic."

Freeman grappled throughout his life with the question of the social responsibility of the creative artist and recorded this struggle in poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. As a leading communist intellectual, he wrote frequently...