A committed radical, Gropper is best known for the political work which he contributed to such left wing publications as The Revolutionary Age, The Liberator, The New Masses, The Worker, and Morgen Freiheit.

His parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine,[1] who were both employed in the city's garment industry, living in poverty on New York's Lower East Side.

[4] This failure of the American economic system to make proper use of his father's talents doubtlessly contributed to William Gropper's lifelong antipathy toward capitalism.

Gropper's alienation was accentuated when on March 24, 1911, he lost a favorite aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster which resulted from locked doors and non-existent exits in a New York sweatshop.

In 1917, Gropper was offered a position on the staff of the New York Tribune, where over the next several years he earned a steady income doing drawings for the paper's special Sunday feature articles.

After The Masses was banned from the U.S. Mail in 1917, due to its unflinching anti-militarism, Gropper joined artists like Robert Minor, Maurice Becker, Art Young, Lydia Gibson, Hugo Gellert, and Boardman Robinson in contributing to its successor, The Liberator.

[10] His time at the publication was not harmonious however, as many of the unpaid and underpaid artists and writers greatly resented Eastman, who collected a relatively opulent paycheck of $75 a week for, as Gropper later recalled, "lying on a couch and composing poetry and reading books".

[11] A little coup was short-circuited in the end by Eastman's own determination to give up his post so as to visit Soviet Russia in 1922, a decision no doubt accelerated by the magazine's growing financial woes.

The marriage proved to be short and turbulent, marked by the couple's collaboration to produce a book of verse and drawings called Chinese White, published in 1922.

[3] Shortly after their marriage, the couple spent a year in the Soviet Union, where Gropper was employed briefly on the staff of the newspaper of the All-Union Communist Party, Pravda.