Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Reavey's literary career was his claim, made to the New York press and to British editor and publisher Alan Clodd, that he had written The Painted Bird for Jerzy Kosiński.
Then he became associated with the group of Cambridge writers associated with the magazine Experiment, including William Empson, Jacob Bronowski, Charles Madge, Kathleen Raine and Julian Trevelyan.
He met Thomas MacGreevy, who introduced him to Beckett, James Joyce, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin and to many of the writers who published in transition.
Reavey found himself extremely active in this scene, collecting paintings, contributing to Read's Surrealism (1936) and representing authors via the Bureau.
To coincide with the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, Europa Press published Thorns of Thunder, the first collection of English translations of poems by Paul Éluard to appear.
Apart from occasional trips to Paris, London, Dublin and Belfast, Reavey lived out his life in the United States, where he published a number of important translations, including Alexander Esenin-Volpin's A Leaf of Spring (1961), Fyodor Abramov's New Life: A Day on a Collective Farm (1963), the bilingual anthology The New Russian Poets 1953 – 1968 (1968) and contributions to Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Stolen Apples (1972).
A group of seven Reavey poems were printed in the 1971 1930s special issue of The Lace Curtain and he was represented in John Montague's Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974).