Born 27 December 1904 in Budapest. He graduated from the Teachers` Institute in Senica in 1923 and started teaching in Bratislava. In 1925 he became a member of the Communist Party and began his career as a journalist in mainly Czech dailies and magazines (Pravda chudoby in Ostrava, Rudý večerník in Prague, Rudé právo, Rudá záře, Tvorba, Haló-noviny, Ľudový denník, Slovenské zvesti, Nová svoboda and others). In 1939 he was forced to return to Slovakia where he joined the resistance and co-formulated the political aims of the nationwide uprising against the Germans. As Vice-Chairman of the Slovak National Council he had talks in London and in Moscow. After the liberation he was Slovak Commissioner for Education and Enlightenment and headed the national cultural institution Matica slovenská. In 1950 he was stripped of all posts, in February 1951 he was arrested and in 1954 in a rigged trial (together with G. Husák and V. Clementis) he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. In 1955 he was released on parole (rehabilitated as late as 1963). From 1955 to 1962 Novomeský worked in the Memorial of National Letters in Prague, then returned to Bratislava and was employed in the Slovak Academy of Sciences`s Institute of Literature. In August 1968 he once more reached the top of the Communist Party and was elected Chairman of Matica slovenská. In 1970, in protest against the policy of normalisation he resigned from his post in the Presidency of the Communist Party and soon after became seriously ill. Novomeský died 4 September 1976 in Bratislava.
