Masses & Mainstream

Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963) was an American Marxist monthly publication headquartered in New York City. The magazine resulted from a merger between New Masses, which ceased publication in January 1948, and Mainstream, a Communist cultural quarterly established in 1947.^[1]

Masses & Mainstream was edited by Samuel Sillen. On the board of editors were critics, writers and scholars including Sidney Finkelstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mike Gold, Herbert Aptheker, Phillip Bonosky, Lloyd L. Brown, Annette Rubinstein, and John Howard Lawson.^[2]

Although many of the magazine's best-known contributors had written for New Masses before World War II, Masses & Mainstream also provided a platform for younger writers such as Howard Fast, Thomas McGrath, Eve Merriam, Jesús Colón, and Lorraine Hansberry.^[1][3]

In a book about the African-American cultural left of the 1950s, Mary Washington observes: "Except for black publications, no magazines or journals, even leftist journals like Partisan Review, published black writers regularly in the 1950s or 1960s" to the same extent as Masses & Mainstream.^[4] In its 1952 Negro History Week issue, the magazine listed 20 black contributors—among them Alice Childress, James W. Ford, William L. Patterson, Pettis Perry, Paul Robeson, and Charles W. White—whose writings appeared in the magazine in the prior year.^[5]

The magazine had a circulation of 17,000 in 1948, but steadily lost subscribers during the McCarthy era.^[1] Masses & Mainstream shut down in 1956. It then became an offshoot publication entitled Mainstream which lasted until 1963.^[6]

In addition to its monthly magazine, Masses & Mainstream published a small number of pamphlets and books, including:^[7]

• Howard Fast, Intellectuals in the Fight for Peace (1949)
• Samuel Sillen, Cold War in the Classroom (1950)
• V. J. Jerome, The Negro in Hollywood Films (1950)
• Pablo Neruda, Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems (1950)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, I Take My Stand for Peace (1951)
• Herbert Aptheker, America's Racist Laws, Weapon of National Oppression (1951)
• Lloyd L. Brown, Iron City (1951)
• Steve Nelson, The Volunteers (1953)
• John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953)
• Virginia Gardner, The Rosenberg Story (1954)
• Steve Nelson, The 13th Juror: The Inside Story of My Trial (1955)
• Samuel Sillen, Women against Slavery (1955)