Howard Fast

About Howard Fast:

Howard Fast, the son of a factory worker, was born in New York City in 1914. He dropped out of high school and published his first novel before he was a twenty. Fast held strong left-wing views and a large number of his novels dealt with political themes. This included a series of three books on the American Revolutionary War period: Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished (1942), and Citizen Tom Paine (1943).

In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party and his Marxist views were reflected in the novels that he wrote during this period. This included Freedom Road (1944), a novel of the Reconstruction era; The American (1946), a fictionalized biography of the radical Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld, and Spartacus (1951), an account of the 71 B.C. slave revolt.

In 1950 Fast was ordered to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Fast refused to name fellow members of American Communist Party, claiming that the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution gave him the right to do this. The HUAC and the courts during appeals disagreed and he was sentenced to three months in prison.

Fast was blacklisted but after forming his own publishing company, the Blue Heron Press, he continued write and publish books that reflected his left-wing views. This included Spartacus (1951), an account of the 71 B.C. slave revolt, Silas Timberman (1954), a novel about a victim of McCarthyism and The Story of Lola Gregg (1956), describing the FBI pursuit and capture of a communist trade unionist. In 1956 Fast broke with the Communist Party. The following year he published The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (1957).

The Hollywood Blacklist was ended in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo (And Stanley Kubric directed) wrote the screenplay for Fast's novel, Spartacus.

Fast himself moved to Hollywood where he wrote several screenplays. However, he continued to write political novels and had considerable commercial success with The Immigrants (1977), Second Generation (1978), The Establishment (1979), The Outsider (1984) and the Immigrant's Daughter (1985). His autobiography, Being Red, was published in 1990.