Throughout the 1920s, Vanguard Press issued an array of books on radical topics, including studies of the Soviet Union, socialist theory, and politically oriented fiction by a range of writers.

Its catalog of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and children's literature included the first books of Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Marshall McLuhan, Joyce Carol Oates and Dr. Seuss.

[4] The new publisher was intended to reissue left-wing classics at an affordable cost and to provide an outlet for the publication of new titles otherwise deemed "unpublishable" by the commercial press of the day.

[4] The initial officers and directors of the new publishing house included Jacob Baker, Roger Baldwin, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clinton Golden, Louis Kopelin, Bertha Mailly, Scott Nearing and Rex Stout.

By 1928 the standard price for Vanguard titles, such as the books of the series entitled "Studies of Soviet Russia" and "Current Questions", was 75 cents per copy.

Vanguard also published the 1927 edition of the American Labor Year Book on behalf of the Socialist Party-affiliated Rand School of Social Science, which sold for $1.50.

For a short time the company operated under the joint direction of George Macy, president of Macy-Masius, and Jacob Baker, Vanguard's managing director.

Those comprising his Studs Lonigan trilogy (collected in a single volume in 1935) and Donald Henderson Clarke's Female (1933) were the subject of bitter court fights on obscenity charges.

[11] "Vanguard was singled out in the censorship controversies," wrote media historian John Tebbel, "not only because it published Our Fair City, edited by Robert Allen, a collection of essays demonstrating that civic corruption had not changed since the days of Lincoln Steffens, but because it had issued Calder Willingham's End as a Man, an indictment of military school life, and James Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy.

Vanguard was also under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee on the ground that in the twenties and thirties it had published some books by Communist and left-wing writers.

The Vanguard Press earned a reputation for publishing promising new fiction, poetry, literature for children and young adults, and non-fiction.

"[2] The archives of the Vanguard Press from its conceptual origins in 1925 through approximately 1985, including over 129,000 documents, was donated by Random House to Columbia University in New York City in 1989.