The firm became renowned for its political stance, being both anti-fascist and anti-communist, a position that put them at loggerheads with the ethos of many intellectuals of the time.

[citation needed] When George Orwell parted company with Communist Party sympathizer Victor Gollancz over his editing of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he took his next book Homage to Catalonia to Secker & Warburg, who published it in 1938.

Secker & Warburg published other books by key figures of the anti-Stalinist left, such as Minty Alley, World Revolution, and The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James,[3] Rudolf Rocker and Boris Souvarine,[4] Red Spanish Notebook: the first six months of revolution and the civil war by Juan Ramón Breá and Mary Stanley Low and works by Lewis Mumford.

With its financial position devastated by paper shortages during and after the war, Secker & Warburg were forced to join the Heinemann group of publishers in 1951.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Secker & Warburg published the works of, among others, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, J. M. Coetzee, Alberto Moravia, Günter Grass, Angus Wilson, Michael Moorcock, Melvyn Bragg and Julian Gloag, as well as the British Buddhist Lobsang Rampa.