A short life of the author
Howard Melvin Fast (11 November 1914 – 12 March 2003) was an American novelist whose politically engaged historical fiction made him one of the most widely read left-wing writers of the twentieth century. His novels — about the American Revolution, slavery, the struggle for freedom in antiquity and modernity — sold millions of copies worldwide, were translated into eighty-two languages, and earned him both the Stalin International Peace Prize and, eventually, the deep disillusionment of a true believer who discovered that his faith had been misplaced.
Life
Fast was born in New York City to a working-class family of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants. His mother died when he was eight; his father struggled financially. Fast began publishing in his late teens and was enormously prolific from the start.
During World War II, he worked for the Office of War Information and Voice of America. He joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1943 and remained a member until 1957 — a commitment that defined his career, his reputation, and his suffering.
In 1947, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to cooperate. He was convicted of contempt of Congress and served three months in federal prison in 1950. After his release, he was blacklisted: no major publisher would touch his work.
Major Novels
The Last Frontier (1941) — about the 1878 flight of the Northern Cheyenne from Indian Territory to their Montana homeland — is one of the earliest American novels to portray Native Americans with sympathy and historical accuracy. It remains powerful.
Citizen Tom Paine (1943) is a passionate, novelistic biography of the revolutionary pamphleteer. Fast’s Paine is a radical democrat, a champion of the poor, and a prophet without honour — an obvious surrogate for Fast’s own political commitments. The book was a bestseller and was distributed to American soldiers during the war.
Freedom Road (1944) follows a former slave who becomes a Reconstruction-era congressman in South Carolina, then witnesses the destruction of Reconstruction by white supremacist violence. The novel was one of the first American works of fiction to address Reconstruction sympathetically and was enormously popular among Black readers. It was translated into eighty-two languages.
Spartacus (1951)
Fast’s most famous novel — about the gladiator who led a slave revolt against Rome in 73–71 BC — was written in prison and self-published after every major publisher refused it. Fast founded Blue Heron Press to print it himself, and the novel sold over a million copies through direct mail and word of mouth. Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film, with Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay and Kirk Douglas in the title role, became one of the most celebrated historical epics in cinema history and helped break the Hollywood blacklist.
Later Career
Fast left the Communist Party in 1957, shattered by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes and by the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He wrote The Naked God (1957), a devastating account of his disillusionment. He then reinvented himself as a mainstream popular novelist, writing the Immigrants saga (1977–2000) — a multi-generational family epic set in California — which was commercially successful.
He also published mystery novels under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham.
Critical Standing
Fast’s reputation has suffered from both political prejudice and literary judgment. His prose is sometimes flat, his characterisation schematic, and his didacticism heavy-handed. But his best novels — The Last Frontier, Freedom Road, and Spartacus — are genuinely compelling, and his commitment to telling stories about the dispossessed and the oppressed gives his work a moral seriousness that transcends its formal limitations.
Collecting Fast
Spartacus (1951, Blue Heron Press) in first edition brings $50–$200 — significant because it is one of the most famous self-published novels in American history. Citizen Tom Paine (1943, Duell, Sloan and Pearce) brings $30–$100. The Immigrants series is widely available and inexpensive.