Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was one of America's most distinguished critics. As an international man of letters, he did not confine himself to literature alone, but also investigated main areas of human thought. He fluently pursued learning in seven languages, making it alive for American intellectual readers. He was indeed a ‘ superlative interpreter ’, as Alfred Kazin pointed out. Due to Wilson's wide horizons and perspectives, his works included such diverse areas as literature, politics, language, history and travel. During the 1930s he was mainly interested in political and industrial reporting, as well as studying Marxism, partly neglecting literary criticism. His activities of that decade were not only the outcome of an intellectual curiosity, but a personal need as well, that strongly influenced his political outlook. The growing concern for social justice and for the suffering of the lower classes was the dominant force in Wilson's thought during the thirties. One of the stages in his gradual radicalization was his association in 1934–5 with The Modern Monthly, an anti-Marxist journal. What led the prominent critic, the literary editor of the prestigious New Republic, to join the editorial board of the Monthly, a little magazine with a small circulation? What was Wilson's contribution to the magazine's political approach? Why did he resign after a fourteen-month editorship? How did his association with the editors V. F. Calverton and Max Eastman — who had been denounced by the Communist Party as ‘ social fascists ’ and Trotskyists — influence Wilson's political standing with the Communists? These questions deserve close examination.