[3] Many New Masses contributors are now considered distinguished, even canonical authors/writers, artists, and activists: William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, James Agee, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O'Neill, Rex Stout, and Ernest Hemingway.

Lewis, Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin, Jan Matulka, Ruth McKenney, Maxwell Bodenheim, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Jacob Burck, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Burnshaw, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Crockett Johnson, Wanda Gág, Albert Halper, Hyman Warsager,[4] and Aaron Copland.

[8] Barbara Foley points out, though, that Gold and his peers did not eschew various literary forms in favor of strict realism; they advocated stylistic experimentation, but championed and preferred genuine proletarian authorship.

A substantial number of poems, short stories, journalistic pieces, and quasi-autobiographical sketches by young working-class writers (Richard Wright and Jack Conroy being prime examples) dominated New Masses in its earliest days because the magazine sought "to make the 'worker-writer' a reality in the American radical press.

The early editors were aesthetes who had been impressed by Upton Sinclair's book Mammonart, which argued that most of history's great writers had been propagandists for the rich and powerful.

The convergence of this literary philosophy and CPUSA policy in Depression-era America was facilitated by the John Reed Club of New York City, one of the Party's affiliated organizations.

Using a redacted version of congressional committee hearings, Spivak alleged there was a fascist conspiracy of U.S. financiers to take over the country, and cited the names of several implicated business leaders.

While this content was slowly phased out in favor of politically oriented journalism, New Masses continued to influence the leftist cultural scene.

In one of the magazine's last issues on 30 December 1947, editor Betty Millard published her groundbreaking feminist text, "Woman Against Myth", which examined the history of the women's struggle for equality in the U.S., the USSR, and within the international socialist movement.

That was when fighting the Spanish Civil War and the threat of world fascism trumped class conflict and political revolution in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future.

It struggled with the ideological upheavals caused by blowback from the Moscow Trials and Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, while at the same time facing virulent anti-communism and censorship at home during the war.