While editor at Little, Brown, Cameron was responsible for the promotion of then-unknown writer J. D. Salinger, controversial poet Ogden Nash, and various left wing authors including Lillian Hellman, Howard Fast, and Carey McWilliams.
In 1947 the politically radical Cameron became a public target of red-baiting led by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. over Little, Brown's refusal to publish Animal Farm by George Orwell.
[2] Although sympathetic to those who thought communism might be the answer to the devastation of the Great Depression, Cameron never joined the Communist Party, according to his biographer, Jonathan Coleman.
[1] In 1947 historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., author of the Little, Brown-published survey, The Age of Jackson, brought a copy of British writer George Orwell's bitter anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm in to the publisher for consideration.
[2] Schlesinger wrote in protest against Cameron to the head of Little, Brown and inspired the American Legion, conservative newspaper columnist George Sokolsky, and the anti-Communist weekly Counterattack to focus upon the editor.
[3] The attack by Counterattack was preceded by public testimony on August 22, 1951, by former Daily Worker editor Louis Budenz before the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee asserting direct knowledge that Cameron was a member of the Communist Party.
[3] This provided the impetus for a meeting of the Little, Brown board of directors dedicated to Cameron and his plans to publish the novel Spartacus by Communist author Howard Fast.
[3] Asserting that such a restriction was one which "no free publishing house ought to require of its editor," Cameron refused, instead resigning his position as editor-in-chief of the firm.
As the 1950s came to a close and with the national hysteria about an underground communist conspiracy largely abated, the talented Cameron was no longer considered persona non-grata with the publishing industry.