He began his literary career in the 1890s as a Symbolist poet and continued as a neo-Naturalist novelist;[1] in 1916, he published Under Fire, a novel about World War I based on his experience which is described as one of the earliest works of the Lost Generation movement[2] or as the work which started it;[3] the novel had a major impact on the later writers of the movement, namely on Ernest Hemingway[4] and Erich Maria Remarque.

[6] In years following the war, his work acquired a definite political orientation; he became a member of the French Communist Party[1] and an Anti-Fascist and an anti-war activist.

[10] In 1908, Barbusse wrote a novel Hell (L'Enfer), in which he described the life of a young Parisian who lives in a boarding house and spies through a hole in his wall on the other boarders and sees birth, death, adultery and lesbianism.

[11] Invalided out of the army three times, Barbusse served in the war for 17 months, until November 1915, when he was permanently moved into a clerical position due to pulmonary damage, exhaustion, and dysentery.

[12] Barbusse first came to fame with the publication of his novel Le Feu (translated by William Fitzwater Wray as Under Fire) in 1916, which was based on his experiences during World War I.

Of these, the 1921 Le Couteau entre les dents (The Knife Between My Teeth) marks Barbusse's siding with Bolshevism and the October Revolution.

[15] In 1934, Barbusse sent Egon Kisch to Australia to represent the International Movement Against War and Fascism as part of his work for the Comintern.

[citation needed] An associate of Romain Rolland's and editor of Clarté, he attempted to define a "proletarian literature", akin to Proletkult and Socialist realism.

[18] In his 1928 book Voici ce qu'on a fait de la Géorgie, Barbusse praised post-sovietization political, social, and economic conditions in Georgia and completely glossed over the brutal methods employed by Stalin which disturbed the dying Lenin,[6] triggering a critical response from the Georgian émigré Dathico Charachidze who published in 1929 Barbusse, les Soviets et la Géorgie, with a sympathetic preface by Karl Kautsky.

[19][20][21] In 1930, he published a book Russie, an account of year-long living in the Soviet Union which contained flattering references to Stalin.

[7] Although Barbusse had a friendly relationship with Leon Trotsky in the middle of the 1920s, in the book he was condemned as an intriguer and a deviationist, a Menshevik at heart.

[7] Victor Serge, a writer and a member of the Left Opposition, met Barbusse in the 1920s and tried to make him aware of the political repression in the USSR: When I told him about the persecution, he pretended to have a headache, or not to hear, or to be rising to stupendous heights: "Tragic destiny of revolution, immensities, profundities, yes... yes... Ah my friend!"