Howard Melvin Fast (November 11, 1914 – March 12, 2003) was an American author and television writer. Also writing under the pen names E.V. Cunningham, Behn Boruch, and Walter Ericson, his career spanned almost seven decades and several genres, including historical novels and noir. Fast mainly wrote novels, as well as short stories, poems, plays and non-fiction. Among his best known work are Spartacus (1951), April Morning (1961), and The Immigrants (1977). Several of Fast's novels have been adapted into movies and television series, most notably Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). A staunch communist early in his life, Fast was jailed in the 1950s after testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Biography Early life Fast was born in New York City. His mother, Ida (née Miller), was a British Jewish immigrant, and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who shortened his name from Fastovsky upon arrival in America. When his mother died in 1923 and his father became unemployed, Howard's youngest brother, Julius, went to live with relatives, while he and his older brother, Jerome, sold newspapers. Howard credited his early voracious reading to a part-time job in the New York Public Library.
Fast began writing at an early age. While hitchhiking and riding railroads around the country to find odd jobs, he wrote his first novel, Two Valleys, published in 1933 when he was 18. His first popular work was Citizen Tom Paine, a fictional account of the life of Thomas Paine. Always interested in American history, Fast also wrote The Last Frontier (about the Cheyenne Indians' attempt to return to their native land, and which inspired the 1964 movie Cheyenne Autumn)Fast, Being Red (1990) pp. 162–63. and Freedom Road (about the lives of former slaves during Reconstruction).
The novel Freedom Road is based on a true story and was made into a miniseries of the same name starring Muhammad Ali, who, in a rare acting role, played Gideon Jackson, an ex-slave in 1870s South Carolina who is elected to the U.S. House and battles the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations to enable former slaves to keep the land that they had tended all their lives.
Contribution to constitutionalism Fast is the author of the prominent "Why the Fifth Amendment?" essay. This essay explains in detail the purpose of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Fast effectively uses the context of the Red Scare to illustrate the purpose of the "Fifth."
Career
Fast spent World War II working with the United States Office of War Information, writing for Voice of America. In 1943, he joined the Communist Party USA
In 1948, author Harry Barnard accused Fast of copyright infringement, charging he "borrowed liberally" from Barnard's 1938 biography of John Peter Altgeld, Eagle Forgotten, the Life of John Peter Altgeld, for his 1946 book about Altgeld, The American: A Middle Western Legend. Fast settled for $7,500 ($93,725 in 2022 dollars). His publisher also agreed to republish Barnard's book."Paying Up," Newsweek, January 19, 1948
In 1950, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities; in his testimony, he refused to disclose the names of contributors to a fund for a home for orphans of American veterans who fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (one of the contributors was Eleanor Roosevelt), and he was given a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress.
While he was at Mill Point Federal Prison, Fast began writing his most famous work, Spartacus, a novel about an uprising among Roman slaves. Blacklisted by major publishing houses following his release from prison, Fast was forced to publish the novel himself. It was a success, going through seven printings in the first four months of publication. (According to Fast in his memoir, 50,000 copies were printed, of which 48,000 were sold.)
He subsequently established the Blue Heron Press, which allowed him to continue publishing under his own name throughout the period of his blacklisting. Just as the production of the film version of Spartacus (released in 1960) is considered a milestone in the breaking of the Hollywood blacklist, the reissue of Fast's novel by Crown Publishers in 1958 effectively ended his own blacklisting within the American publishing industry.
In 1952, Fast ran for Congress in New York's 23rd district on the American Labor Party ticket. He came in fourth place with 5.5% of the vote. During the 1950s he also worked for the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. In 1953, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. Later that decade, Fast broke with the Party over issues of conditions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, particularly after Nikita Khrushchev's report "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences" at a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, denouncing the personality cult and dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, and the Soviet military intervention to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in November. In his autobiographical work titled The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party published in 1957, he wrote: "There was the evil in what we dreamed of as Communists: we took the noblest dreams and hopes of mankind as our credo; the evil we did was to accept the degradation of our own souls—and because we surrendered in ourselves, in our own party existence, all the best and most precious gains and liberties of mankind—because we did this, we betrayed mankind, and the Communist party became a thing of destruction."
In the mid-1950s, Fast moved with his family to Teaneck, New Jersey.Und Spartakus, Berliner Zeitung, 15 March 2003. Article in German relating the decision to move to Teaneck. In 1974, Fast and his family moved to California, where he wrote television scripts, including such television programs as How the West Was Won. In 1977, he published The Immigrants, the first of a six-part series of novels.
Personal life and death Fast married his first wife, Bette Cohen, on June 6, 1937. Their children were Jonathan and Rachel. Bette died in 1994. During the marriage, Fast had a relationship in the 1950s with Isabel (Dowden) Johnson, former wife of Lester Cole and later wife to Alger Hiss. In 1999, he married Mercedes O'Connor, who survived him. Mercedes brought three sons to the marriage.
Fast's son Jonathan Fast, himself a novelist, was married to novelist Erica Jong; their daughter is the author Molly Jong-Fast. Howard's younger brother Julius Fast was also a writer.
Fast died in his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
Works
Novels
Two Valleys (1933) Strange Yesterday (1934) Place in the City (1937) Conceived in Liberty (1939) The Last Frontier (1941) Haym Solomon: Son of Liberty (1941) Lord Baden-Powell of the Boy Scouts (1941) The Romance of a People (1941) Goethals and the Panama Canal (1942) The Picture-book History of the Jews (1942) The Tall Hunter (1942) The Unvanquished (1942) Citizen Tom Paine (1943) Freedom Road (1944) Clarkton (1947) The Children (1947) My Glorious Brothers (1948) The Proud and the Free (1950) Spartacus (1951) Fallen Angel (1952). Under the pseudonym Walter Ericson Tony and the Wonderful Door (1952) The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1953) Silas Timberman (1954) The Story of Lola Gregg (1956) Moses, Prince of Egypt (1958) The Winston Affair (1959) The Golden River (1960) April Morning (1961) Power (1962) Agrippa's Daughter (1964) Torquemada (1966) The Crossing Series: The Crossing (1971) Bunker Hill (2001). Prequel The Hessian (1972) Lavette Family Series: The Immigrants (1977) Second Generation (1978) The Establishment (1979) The Legacy (1981) The Immigrant's Daughter (1985) An Independent Woman (1997) Max (1982) The Outsider (1984) The Dinner Party (1987) The Pledge (1988) The Confession of Joe Cullen (1989) The Trial of Abigail Goodman (1993) Seven Days in June (1994) The Bridge Builder's Story (1995) Redemption (1999) Greenwich (2000)
Novels under the pseudonym Behn Boruch In the Beginning: The Story of Abraham (1958) The Patriarchs: The Story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (1959) The Coat of Many Colors: The Story of Joseph (1959)
Novels under the pseudonym E.V. Cunningham
Private investigator Alan Macklin:Conquest, John (1990). Trouble Is Their Business : Private Eyes in Fiction, Film, and Television, 1927-1988. New York : Garland Publishing. p. 74. . "Fast is best known as Cunningham for his Masuto books, but Alan Macklin is a small-time investigator hired by a multimillionaire on the eve of the wedding to find out who his prospective bride really is. Harvey Krim is an insurance investigator, and, in his superior's words, 'cynical, nasty and unreliable and utterly unprincipled. The only thing that can be said in your favor is that you have brains,' and his style is very Pi-like. See Films: SYLVIA." Macklin: Sylvia (1960); Krim: Lydia (1964), Cynthia (1968) Sylvia (1960), film adaptation Sylvia (1965) Phyllis (1962) Alice (1963) Shirley (1964) Helen (1966) Insurance investigator Harvey Krim: Lydia (1964) Cynthia (1968) New York City CP John Comaday and ADA Larry Cohen:Heising, Willetta L. (1998). Detecting Men : A Reader's Guide and Checklist for Mystery Series Written by Men. Dearborn, MI: Purple Moon Press. p. 70. . "John Comaday & Larry Cohen...police commissioner & Manhattan DA’s 1st assistant in New York: 1 - Penelope (1965); 2 - Margie (1966)" Penelope (1965), adapted as Penelope (1966) Margie (1966) The Masao Masuto Mysteries:Husband, Janet G.; Husband Jonathan F. (2009). Sequels: An Annotated Guide to Novels in Series. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. p. 201. . "Masao Masuto, Beverly Hills' Japanese American detective, is a Zen Buddhist. His wily and tenacious cast of mind helps him sort out some complicated cases, and his knowledge of karate comes in very handy at times. Beverly Hills is too small and peaceful a town to have a permanent homicide squad, but when a case involves possible murder, Masuto and his partner Sy Beckman take over." Samantha, AKA The Case of the Angry Actress (1967) The Case of the One-Penny Orange (1977) The Case of the Russian Diplomat (1978) The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs (1979) The Case of the Sliding Pool (1981) The Case of the Kidnapped Angel (1982) The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie (1984) Sally (1967) The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun (1967) Millie (1973) The Wabash Factor (1986)
Short story collections
Patrick Henry and the Frigate's Keel, and other stories of a young nation (1945). Contains 12 short stories: "Patrick Henry and the Frigate's Keel" "Rachel" (1941) "The Pirate and the General" "Neighbor Sam" (1942) "Conyngham" "The Brood" (1939) "The Day of Victory" (1943) "Amos Todd's Vinegar" (1943) "Sun in the West" (1938) "The Bookman" (1936) "The Price of Liberty" "Not Too Hard" (1939) Departure, and Other Stories (1949). Contains 19 short stories: "Departure" (1947) "The Old Wagon" (1945) "The Shore Route" "Onion Soup" "An Epitaph for Sidney" "Where Are Your Guns?" (1944) "Spoil the Child" (1938) "The Little Folk from the Hills" (1948) "Who Is He? "The Suckling Pig" "The Rickshaw" (1947) "The Gentle Virtue" "Dumb Swede" "The Gray Ship" (1946) "Three Beautiful Things" "The First Rose of Summer" "Wake Up Glad" "The Police Spy" "Thirty Pieces of Silver" (1949) The Last Supper and Other Stories (1955). Contains 16 short stories: "The Last Supper" "The Ancestor" "The Vision of Henry J. Baxter" "A Walk Home" "Coca Cola" "Christ in Cuernavaca", AKA "The Man Who Looked Like Jesus" "The Power of Positive Thinking" "Dignity" "Gentleman from Mississippi" "Journey to Boston" (1949) "The Child and the Ship" (1950) "Sunday Morning" "The Upraised Pinion" "The Holy Child" "My Father" "Coda: The Poet in Philadelphia"