Howard Fast

Novelist and activist

  • Born: November 11, 1914
  • Birthplace: New York, New York
  • Died: March 12, 2003
  • Place of death: Old Greenwich, Connecticut

Fast is noted for his fiction that focuses on American history and for his celebration of historic underdogs, including Spartacus, the slave leader in ancient Rome, and the Maccabees in ancient Israel.

Early Life

Howard Fast was the fourth of five children born to Barney Fast and Ida Miller, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania, respectively. Howard Fast’s mother died when Fast was only eight, and his father was often out of work and absent. By the age of ten, Fast was taking odd jobs to help support the family. He did well in school and was a voracious reader, and he decided at the age of fifteen to become a writer. He also became interested in Marxism.

Although of Jewish heritage, Fast experienced little of Jewish religion or culture in his upbringing. The family did not attend synagogue or keep kosher, and Fast did not speak Yiddish. His main sense of being Jewish came from being attacked by Irish and Italian boys who called him a Christ-killer.

After completing high school, Fast attended the National Academy School of Fine Arts, so that he could illustrate his writings, but he left after little more than a year. He continued to write, and in 1931 he published a short story in the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Two years later, when he was only eighteen, he published his first novel, Two Valleys (1933).

Life’s Work

Fast found his true métier at the end of the 1930’s, with a series of novels set during the American Revolutionary War, culminating in the highly acclaimed Citizen Tom Paine (1943), about the revolutionary pamphleteer. He also won acclaim for Freedom Road (1944), the story of a freed slave during the Reconstruction era.

During World War II, Fast worked for the Office of War Information, writing news reports for the Voice of America. In 1944, after years of involvement in left-wing causes, he joined the Communist Party. After the war he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and jailed for three months for refusing to name other Communists. He also found himself blacklisted, unable to find a publisher for his new novel, Spartacus. He published it successfully himself, however, in 1951, and in 1960 it was made into a motion picture starring Kirk Douglas.

During the postwar period, Fast worked on various left-wing campaigns, including the 1948 presidential election campaign of Henry Wallace. In 1952, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket. He also wrote regularly for the Communist paper, The Daily Worker, and won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.

In 1948, the year of the creation of the state of Israel, Fast published My Glorious Brothers about the revolt of the Maccabees in ancient Israel, but he was criticized by fellow Communists for promoting Jewish nationalism instead of class struggle. Similar criticisms over the next few years, along with the revelations of the crimes of Joseph Stalin, led Fast to leave the Communist Party in 1957. After this, his writings became less politically committed, though he still dealt with social and political issues.

In the 1970’s, Fast began publishing a sweeping family saga of five novels, beginning with The Immigrants (1977), which later became a television miniseries. He continued to write stories about the Revolutionary War, and also he wrote widely on topics from Zen Buddhism to Jane Austen. Under the pseudonyms Walter Ericson and E. V. Cunningham, he wrote mystery novels and thrillers, along with a series of novels about strong, independent women. By the time of his death he had published more than eighty books.

Significance

Fast is generally celebrated for his ability to bring past eras alive in his historical fiction, most of all the era of the Revolutionary War. Especially in his early works he is notable for portraying struggling underdogs who fight back against oppressive authority.

A strong thread of American patriotism runs through Fast’s works. His Jewish background plays a secondary role, but he did portray many Jewish characters, and he said that Freedom Road, about black slavery, was inspired in part by his experience of anti-Semitism. Some commentators add that Fast’s interest in social justice may have stemmed in part from his Jewish background.

Fast has been neglected by academic literary critics, perhaps because of his politics at the beginning of his career or because in later years he came to be seen as a popular writer lacking in seriousness. However, some of his Revolutionary War novels have come to be used in schools or made into documentaries, and some of his early works, notably Citizen Tom Paine and Spartacus, remain well-respected.

Bibliography

Fast, Howard. Being Red. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. A lively memoir of Fast’s time in the Communist Party and his work for the Office of War Information.

Kodat, Catherine Gunther. “’I’m Spartacus!’” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Discusses Spartacus as portrayed by Fast and others. Criticizes Fast’s novel for homophobia.

Macdonald, Andrew. Howard Fast: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Includes a biographical sketch and detailed analysis of several of Fast’s novels. Tends to Freudian analysis, but also presents alternative viewpoints.

Malamud, Margaret. “Cold War Romans.” Arion 14, no. 3 (2007): 121-153. Discusses Fast’s Spartacus and the movie based on it; also provides biographical material on Fast. Sees his novel as a searing indictment of American capitalism.

Wald, Alan M. “The Legacy of Howard Fast.” In The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992. Criticizes Fast for being too much like a soap-opera writer and says that even in his Communist days he was not truly radical.