His schoolmates included Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, and Whittaker Chambers.
[4][5] Solow's wife, Tess Slesinger described much of the Menorah scene in the guise of fiction in her book The Unpossessed (1934).
According to Alfred Kazin, Solow was: Although a little-known editor of the obscure Menorah Journal in the 1920s, and later of Fortune, Herbert Solow manages to appear in Tess Slesinger's Unpossessed (1934) as a New England Calvinist at war with his own Marxism; in Eleanor Clark's Bitter Box (1946) as a disillusioned Communist bank clerk; and, most impressively, in James T. Farrell's posthumously published Sam Holman (1983) as the Communist lady-killer after whom the book is named.
[7][8] Solow abandoned Leftist politics altogether in the 1940s and, like Chambers, joined the publishing empire of Henry Luce as an editor at Fortune Magazine.
[6][9][10] Solow edited all of and translated parts of Management in Russian Industry and Agriculture by Gregory Bienstock, Solomon M. Schwarz, and Aaron Yugow, published in 1944.