[2][3] However, in 1921, his family became impoverished due to the agrarian reforms brought in by the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia and they moved to the central Bosnian town of Travnik, his mother's birthplace.

[9][10] In late 1939 or early 1940, Skender Kulenović was expelled from the KPJ for having refused to sign an open letter criticising the government and advocating autonomy for Bosnia and Herzegovina – a decision which prevented him from publishing in many of the journals he had worked with until then.

[3] He engaged in literary work, edited the newspapers Krajiški partizan, Bosanski udarnik, Glas and Oslobođenje, and gave speeches promoting the struggle for liberation and advocating for brotherhood and unity between Muslims and Serbs.

[2] The folk-epic Stojanka majka Knežopoljka references the Kozara Offensive and subsequent persecution of the Serbian population, describing the pain of a mother who lost her three sons.

[2][3] According to the writer Jasmin Agić, Pisma Jove Stanivuka and Ševa represented the foundation of the "revolutionary heroism" theme that would become present in Kulenović's writings.

[4] Kulenović's life story is in many ways typical of a Bosnian-born intellectual of the Yugoslav age: born into a Bosnian Muslim family, educated in the Catholic tradition and living in the Serbian capital.

[12] The historian Pål Kolstø cites Kulenović and Meša Selimović as among the prominent Bosnian writers with a "stubborn Yugoslav or mixed Yugoslav-ethnic identity" which makes it difficult to incorporate or define their works along any one particular line.