George Goetz, who published under the name V. F. Calverton, is best known as the editor of the Modern Quarterly, later the Modern Monthly, and as the author of works in which, taken together, he attempted to "Americanize Marxism" and to develop a sociological critique of U.S. literature and culture. In tandem, he was briefly notorious for his writings on sex and on the role of the intellectual in industrial society. A significant figure in the Marxist literary criticism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, his parallel ambitions as a novelist were largely frustrated and unrealized. In the half decade prior to his death in 1940 he was increasingly isolated from the radical intelligentsia, and he partially revised his left-wing beliefs.

Goetz was born on 25 June 1900 in Baltimore, Maryland, to Ida (née Geiger) and Charles Goetz, a custom tailor. His father's drinking, the religiosity and...