Born in the Ukraine, Joseph Freeman came to the United States in 1904. A socialist from age seventeen, he was one of the more visible figures of the Left in the 1920s and 1930s as an editor of the Liberator and cofounder of New Masses. His poetry regularly appeared in journals, but it was never collected in a book. He worked for the Soviet news agency TASS from 1925-1931 but later broke with the party. His most famous work is his political autobiography An American Testament (1936). Twelve of his poems are reprinted in the anthology Social Poetry of the 1930s (1978).