Wright joins the John Reed Club of Chicago, linking him to leftist writers nationally. He reads New Masses and International Literature and submits revolutionary poetry to Left Front. He is elected executive secretary of the Chicago John Reed Club.
Wright joins the Communist party. Publishes poetry in Left Front, Anvil, and New Masses, and becomes a member of the editorial board of Left Front. His mother suffers a relapse of her paralysis. The party decides to disband the John Reed Clubs and ceases publication of Left Front, increasing Wright's disillusionment with his place as an artist in the party. As he tells it in American Hunger, he had already become exasperated by party demands that he spend time pricing pork chops.
Wright continues to publish poetry in small journals, and he begins submitting his first novel, "Cesspool," to publishers. Over the next few years it will be rejected repeatedly, and finally it will be published posthumously as Lawd Today. Wright goes to New York for the American Writers' Congress, where he speaks on "The Isolation of the Negro Writer," in which he argues for the usefulness of the now abandoned John Reed Clubs. He publishes a poem about lynching in Partisan Review and writes an article for New Masses entitled "Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite." He is hired by the Federal Writers' Project to research the history of Illinois and of the Negro in Chicago.