Wishart was immersed in the political and cultural life of the Popular Front, publishing literature, drama and poetry, as well as political economy, working-class history, and the classics of Marxism; New Writing, a twice-yearly Lawrence & Wishart anthology, published writers such as W.H.Auden, Ralph Fox, Christopher Isherwood, and Cecil Day Lewis. During the post-war period, it published early work by Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson and John Saville. Other outstanding marxist writers published in this period include J.D.Bernal, George Thompson and Brian Simon. Amongst the many working-class writers both of fiction and reportage that it published during the 1950s and 1960s, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists stands out as a classic.

In 1970s, Lawrence & Wishart began its project of translating the work of Antonio Gramsci and published essay collections from the acclaimed communist universities of London, including writing by Ros Brunt, Stuart Hall, Alan Hunt, and Anne Sassoon. From the mid-1980s, it began publishing work of Joseph Bristow, Beatrix Campbell, Lorraine Gamman, Doreen Massey, Christopher Norris, Michael Rustin, Judith Squires, Jeffrey Weeks, Lola Young, and many more. The subjects covered during this time period include gender, race, and sexuality.

From the 1990s Lawrence & Wishart began to establish a reputation as a journals publisher. It now publishes Soundings, New Formations, Renewal, Anarchist Studies, and Twentieth Century Communism, all of which, in their different ways attempt to engage critically with contemporary political culture. Recently it has begun to publish free-to-view online books on contemporary politics, including Regeneration, on generational politics, and the Soundings collection The Neoliberal Crisis. Best-selling titles in the last few years have included The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis and Breaking up Britain: Four Nations after a Union. It has also published books with a number of partners, including Compass, the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the Marx Memorial Library, the Socialist History Society, Unison, and Unite the Union.

Lawrence & Wishart was founded in 1936 and I based in London, England.