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Max Eastman was born in 1883 in Canandaigua, N.Y. to Samuel and Annis Ford Eastman, both ministers--each having studied theology at Oberlin College. Max's father had caught pneumonia while on active duty during the Civil War and suffered from ill health for many years afterward. Samuel's condition meant that for years the burden of family support had to be assumed by his wife--at a time when a woman's place was in the home. In Max's autobiographical work, Enjoyment of Living (1948), he discusses the frights and fears of his early childhood. He expresses his belief that his childhood was blighted, partly because his conception marked the end of sexual relations between his parents, and partly because the tragic death of this oldest brother Morgan in 1884 from scarlet fever, resulted in what he called "The Shadow in My Soul." This "shadow" was a combination of his mother's deep depressions and Max's own sickly constitution. Eastman wrote, "I imbibed that irrational emotion which engulfed so much of my early life and upon which my gradually emerging equilibrium, my gestures of courage, my wonderful days of delight, all indeed that I am…float rather precariously and on a shallow keel."
After his education at Williams College and Columbia University, Max went to live with his older
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sister, Crystal Eastman, in Greenwich Village. Crystal was remembered by ex-socialist writer John Spargo, as a woman that wherever you met her, "she was the most intelligent person in the room." After graduating from Vassar in 1903 Crystal received a master's degree in sociology from Columbia, and a law degree from New York University in 1907. She went on to write Work Accidents and the Law (1910), while serving from 1909 to 1911 as secretary and only female member of the New York State Employer's Liability Commission.
In 1913, in association with a group of writers and artists, Max set the editorial policy of The Masses, a socialist monthly featuring art and opinion. He continued in this work until 1917, when the publication was suppressed by the government for opposing the entry of the U. S. into World War I. The Masses was wildly popular among literary and left wing people. The list of talented contributors included John Sloan, Witter Bynner, William Rose Benet, Carl Sandburg, Harry Kemp, Susan Glaspell, Franklin P. Adams, Arturo Giovannitti, Sherwood Anderson, James Oppenheim, Mabel Dodge, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Randolph Bourne, Babette Deutsch, Romain Rollard, Bertrand Russell, Maxim Gorky, Arthur B. Davies, Boardman Robinson, Jo Davidson, Stuart Davis, Glenn O. Coleman, George Bellows, and
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Robert Minor. By 1913 commercial magazine standards, The Masses broke all convention. The magazines of the day ran stories that were frequently sentimental. The Masses published stories that reeked of realism. One of The Masses leading contributors, was John Reed, a writer and editor for The Lampoon. Reed gave The Masses some of its best stories. Today, The Masses is best remembered for its artwork, which ranged from huge, powerful two-page illustrations down to Arthur B. Davies's pretty nudes. The artwork made The Masses bold and beautiful. The magazine had about 5,000 subscribers and sold as many more through newspaper stands. By 1917, Max built sales up to 15,000.The Masses was too intellectual to be popular, and too irreverent to win a broad following among Socialists. George Bernard Shaw sent Max a long letter in 1914 urging caution and good taste. Shaw took exception to its anti-clericalism and to the advertisements for books on sex. Shaw accused Max of "admitting vulgar and ignorant stuff because it was blasphemous, and coarse and carnal work because it was scandalous." In Love and Revolution Eastman said of the publication: "The Masses was not ill-humored and bitter, it was lusty and gay.
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