John Joseph Sherry Mangan was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. Under the name Sherry Mangan he launched successive careers as a little magazine editor, a novelist, a poet, a short-story writer, and a book designer prior to 1938. His first literary associates were mainly American expatriates in Paris during the mid-twenties, and the cultural life of that city was the most persistent influence on his intellectual development ever afterward. A number of Mangan's experimental prose writings were partly inspired by the techniques of the French Surrealists, and Mangan was responsible for introducing work by several Paris-based writers to the American public.

Between 1938 and 1948 Mangan was an internationally known journalist for Time, Life, and Fortune, and he frequently reported on cultural and political events in Paris. He was also a dedicated Marxist and in the last twenty-five years of his life an adherent of Leon Trotsky's ideas; he served on the...