His most important novels include Esir Şehrin İnsanları (1956), Devlet Ana (1967) and Yorgun Savaşçı (1965), in all of which Tahir uses historical background to support his characters and settings.
In 1938, Kemal Tahir and Nazım Hikmet were accused of "spreading sedition" amongst the armed forces by the Navy Command Court Martial.
He also wrote romance and adventure novels and film scripts, using aliases such as "Körduman", "Bedri Eser", "Samim Aşkın", "f. m. ikinci", "Nurettin Demir" and "Ali Gıcırlı", and undertook translations from French.
After a lung operation in 1970, Tahir worked on vernacularising Marxist terminology and creating a national left ideology to suit a Turkish-Anatolian socio-cultural identity even though he was criticised for doing this by many left-wing intellectuals.
Marxist historical theory is based on the existence of a bourgeois class, something that did not develop in the Ottoman Empire (as in many other 'peripheral countries').
Perhaps the greatest intellectual struggle of Tahir's life was to reshape Marxist historical theory to fit the reality of Turkish history.
After studying Marx and Engels' opinions about eastern societies, Kemal Tahir worked on the theories of historians and sociologists like Ömer Lütfi Barkan, Mustafa Akdağ, Halil İnalcık, Niyazi Berkes and Şerif Mardin.
In his novel Devlet Ana (Mother State) he described the governmental and social structure of Ottoman society in its beginnings; in Kurt Kanunu (Law of the Wolf), he narrated the İzmir assassination incident, a failed attempt to kill Atatürk; in Rahmet Yolları Kesti (Rain Closed the Roads) he analysed the banditry phenomenon; and in Yedi Çınar Yaylası (Seven Plane Tree Plateau)," he explored the ağa" system.
İn his historical novel Yorgun Savaşçı (Tired Warrior), Tahir described the period when the leaderless national resistance forces in Anatolia came together and started the Turkish Independence War.
Some of his novels (like Karılar Koğuşu, Haremde Dört Kadın, Esir Şehrin İnsanları and Kurt Kanunu) were later adapted into movies.