Howard Melvin Fast (November 11, 1914 – March 12, 2003) was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under thepen namesE.V. Cunningham andWalter Ericson.
Fast was born inNew 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 theNew 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 wasCitizen Tom Paine, a fictional account of the life ofThomas Paine. Always interested in American history, Fast also wroteThe Last Frontier (about theCheyenne Indians' attempt to return to their native land, and which inspired the 1964 movieCheyenne Autumn)[1] andFreedom Road (about the lives of formerslaves duringReconstruction).
The novelFreedom Road is based on a true story and was made into aminiseries of the same name starringMuhammad Ali, who, in a rare acting role, played Gideon Jackson, an ex-slave in 1870sSouth Carolina who is elected to theU.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.
While he was atMill Point Federal Prison, Fast began writing his most famous work,Spartacus, a novel about an uprising amongRoman slaves.[3]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 theBlue 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 ofSpartacus (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.
In1952, Fast ran forCongress inNew York's 23rd district on theAmerican Labor Party ticket. He came in fourth place with 5.5% of the vote.[4] During the 1950s he also worked for the Communist newspaper, theDaily Worker. In 1953, he was awarded theStalin Peace Prize. Later that decade, Fast broke with the Party over issues of conditions in theSoviet Union andEastern Europe, particularly afterNikita Khrushchev's report "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences" at a closed session of the20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, denouncing thepersonality cult anddictatorship ofJoseph Stalin,[5] and the Soviet military intervention to suppress theHungarian Revolution of 1956 in November. In his autobiographical work titledThe 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."[6]
In 1948, authorHarry Barnard accused Fast of copyright infringement, charging he "borrowed liberally" from Barnard's biography ofJohn Peter Altgeld for his own book about Altgeld,The American. Fast settled for $7,500 ($93,725 in 2022 dollars). His publisher also agreed to republish Barnard's book.[8]
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 ofLester Cole and later wife toAlger Hiss.[9][10] In 1999, he married Mercedes O'Connor, who survived him. Mercedes brought three sons to the marriage.
^Fast, Howard (1954).Silas Timberman. New York: Blue Heron Press.
^abConquest, John (1990).Trouble Is Their Business : Private Eyes in Fiction, Film, and Television, 1927-1988. New York : Garland Publishing. p. 74.ISBN0824059476. "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)
^Husband, Janet G.; Husband Jonathan F. (2009).Sequels: An Annotated Guide to Novels in Series. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. p. 201.ISBN978-0-8389-0967-6. "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."
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