Generous and outgoing, Marvin Mandell was a Socialist who believed equality was more than just a philosophy. For him, it was a daily practice, a way of life.

He and his wife, the late ­Betty Reid Mandell, treated their daughters as equals, too. They didn’t set a curfew or require them to do their homework, and they asked the girls to address their parents by their first names. “They wanted everyone to be equal,’’ said their daughter Charlotte Mandell Kelly of Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. “They didn’t want us to think of them as authoritarian.’’

A longtime editor of the journal New Politics, which he helped found, Mr. Mandell formerly taught English at Curry College. As a teacher and writer, he drew from his experiences serving in the Army during World War II while considering the messages found in books such as Homer’s “The Iliad.’’

“In my view, ‘The Iliad’ ranks among the most powerful antiwar masterpieces, but due to poor teaching and/or careless reading, it has come to represent the opposite,’’ he wrote in his final New Politics blog post, in January 2014. Homer’s work, he added, “does not glorify macho militarism.’’ Instead, “it shows us men caught in a war without meaning; again and again they try to end it, but they cannot — mostly because of their own irrationality.’’

Mr. Mandell, a retired professor who didn’t use the formal title his doctorate afforded, died Feb. 4 in Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale while recovering from gastrointestinal surgery. He was 90 and had lived in West Roxbury for nearly five decades.

The publication New Politics was a home for the philosophies Mr. Mandell and his wife shared, their daughters said.

“He was extremely informed and astute about leftist politics, a trait he shared with my mother,’’ their daughter Christine of Roslindale said.

Mr. Mandell worked on New Politics since it launched in the early 1960s. He and Betty became editors in the 1990s — a role he stepped down from when she died in 2014, though he continued to serve on the editorial board.

Charlotte said her parents “just really loved each other and shared everything with each other’’ and added: “I don’t really remember them arguing much.’’

Outside his marriage, however, Mr. Mandell believed that arguments could promote the exchange of ideas. “He didn’t do it in a mean way,’’ Charlotte said. “He liked the intellectual exchange in arguing.’’

The only child of Harold Mandell and the former Frieda Sarachan, Mr. Mandell was born in Rochester, N.Y., and grew up in an observant Jewish family. After graduating from high school in Rochester, he lied about his age — he was 17 — and enlisted in the Army.

The experience of serving in Italy with the 88th Infantry Division changed his religious views, Charlotte said. On a train ride through Europe one day, he looked out the window and saw a woman who was begging for money and holding a dead child in her arms. “He just thought that God couldn’t exist when he saw that,’’ Charlotte said. “He said that was the moment that he lost his religion.’’

After the war, he studied mathematics for a year at the US Military Academy at West Point and then transferred to the University of Rochester, where his interest in literature was sparked. He continued studying literature for a master’s at Columbia University and received a doctorate after attending the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

While focusing on the work of the French playwright Henri-Rene Lenormand at Columbia, Mr. Mandell met Betty Reid, who had grown up in a Colorado ranching community and was in New York studying to be a minister.

“There was never any doubt in my mind that she was perfect for me,’’ Mr. Mandell told the Globe after she died in 2014. “She embodied everything I always believed in. She was passionate about social justice and helping the poor.’’

They married in 1958 and moved to West Roxbury a little over a decade later. An adventurous duo, Mr. Mandell and his wife alternated their summer vacations between Cuttyhunk Island and France, where they sometimes rented a canal boat for a couple of weeks to explore the country from the water.

After college, Mr. Mandell taught math at a high school on Staten Island, N.Y., before becoming an English professor at colleges including the State University of New York at Potsdam and the University of Connecticut. He taught at Curry College from 1969 to 1993, Charlotte said.

“He was in many ways the conscience of the college,’’ said Bill Littlefield, the host of WBUR-FM’s “Only a Game,’’ who taught with Mr. Mandell at Curry College for more than a decade.

Mr. Mandell strived to get away from the bureaucracy of education and focus on the basic principles of the literature he taught, Littlefield said. He recalled that at one meeting, while administrators discussed goals for the faculty, Mr. Mandell leaned over to him to say: “My goal is to teach Homer. My mission is to teach it a little better.’’

“He was a teacher in every respect, and a kind of mentor in every respect — whether or not he was in the classroom — and he was very gentle about it,’’ Littlefield said.

Mr. Mandell believed passionately in what he taught his students, and his career as a professor was always more than a job, added Littlefield, who never left Mr. Mandell’s office empty-handed. Mr. Mandell was always lending new materials to friends and colleagues.

He also brought his work home, taking any opportunity to hang a bedsheet on the wall, set up a film projector, and show his children and students classic films such as Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal’’ or “Wild Strawberries.’’

A service has been held for Mr. Mandell, whose daughters are his only immediate survivors.

When he wasn’t teaching, Mr. Mandell was writing — often short stories based on the lives of people he met through his travels. One story called “The Aesculapians,’’ which was an excerpt from an unpublished novel he wrote, was published in the 1972 edition of “Best American Short Stories.’’

Charlotte said her father was curious about the world around him and often used his writing as a chance to highlight the stories and experiences of other people.

“He loved talking and just liked asking people about themselves and what they did,’’ she said. “When people weren’t being represented properly, he would always try to help them.’’

Felicia Gans can be reached at felicia.gans@globe.com.