"[1][2] Abraham Bernard Magil was born in 1905 in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a poor, Jewish, immigrant family.
He won a scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in journalism and was a Phi Beta Kappa Key.
[1] In 1927, Whittaker Chambers came to know Magil at the Daily Worker through their common friends, Harry Freeman and Sender Garlin.
He wrote a poem on the death of Soviet poet Mayakovsky, which appeared along with other poetry in the 1938 Anthology of Proletarian Literature in the United States, edited by Granville Hicks.
Again, he worked there as foreign correspondent for the Daily Worker – and also "supplied Party leaders with information on the political situation both in the United States and in Mexico."
Mexican Communists he knew included: David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, as well as visitors like Pablo Neruda, Juan Marinello, Carlos Raphael Rodriguez, and Hollywood Ten refugees Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner Jr., and Dalton Trumbo.
[1] He returned to the States at McCarthyism's peak, joined the Party's Administrative Committee, establish a National Peace Commission, and continued to write for the Daily Worker.
[1] Magil left the Party with many others in 1992 in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and joined the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.