Howard Melvin Fast (November 11, 1914 New York City - March 12, 2003 Old Greenwich, Connecticut) was a Jewish American novelist and television writer, who wrote also under the pen names E. V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson.

Biography

Early life

His mother, Ida (née Miller), was a British Jewish immigrant and his father, Barney Howard Fast, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. When his mother died in 1923 and his father became unemployed, Howard's youngest brother, Julius, went to live with relatives, while Howard and his older brother Jerome worked by selling newspapers. He credited his early voracious reading to his part-time job in the New York Public Library.

Young Howard 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, was published when he was 18, in 1933. His first popular work was Citizen Tom Paine, a fictional account of the life of Thomas Paine. Always interested in American history, he also wrote The Last Frontier, about an attempt by Cheyennes to return to their native land; and Freedom Road, about the lives of former slaves during Reconstruction.

Career

Fast spent World War II working with the United States Office of War Information, writing for Voice of America. But he had joined the Communist Party USA in 1944, and was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to disclose the names of contributors to a fund for a home for orphans of American veterans of the Spanish Civil War (one of the contributors was Eleanor Roosevelt), and he was imprisoned for three months in 1950 for contempt of Congress.

It was while he was in jail that Fast began writing his most famous work, Spartacus, a novel about an uprising among Roman slaves. Blacklisted for his Communist activities and his criminal record, Fast was forced to publish the novel by his own Blue Heron Press. Unable to publish under his own name, he used various pseudonyms, including E.V. Cunningham, under which he published a series of popular detective novels starring a Nisei detective with the Beverly Hills, California Police Department.

In 1952, Fast ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket. During the 1950s he also worked for the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker. In 1953, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. But, later in the decade, Fast broke with the Party over issues of conditions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Shortly afterward, Fast wrote April Morning, an account of the Battle of Lexington and Concord from the perspective of a fictional teenager. While not originally intended as a "young adult" novel, it has become a frequent assignment in American secondary schools and is probably thus his most popular work in the early 21st century. A film version was made for television in 1988.

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.

He married his first wife, Bette Cohen, on June 6, 1937. Their children are Jonathan and Rachel. Bette died in 1994. In 1999 he married Mercedes O'Connor, who had already three sons.

Fast's son Jonathan Fast, himself a novelist, was the husband of novelist Erica Jong, their daughter is the novelist Molly Jong-Fast.

Works

• Jews - Story of People (1982) ISBN 0-440-34444-1
• Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (1951, reprinted 2006) ISBN 0-486-45296-4

Autobiography

• Being Red (1990)
• (1957)

Novels

• Two Valleys (1933)
• Strange Yesterday (1934)
• Place in the City (1937)
• Conceived in Liberty; a novel of Valley Forge (1939)
• The Last Frontier (novel) (1941)
• The Unvanquished (1942)
• Citizen Tom Paine (1943)
• Freedom Road (1944)
• (1946)
• Clarkton (1947)
• The Children (1947)
• My Glorious Brothers (1948)
• The Proud and the Free (1950)
• Spartacus (1951) ISBN 1-56324-599-X
• The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, a New England legend (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)
• Sally (1967)
• The Crossing (1971)
• The Hessian (1972)
• The Immigrants (1977)
• Second Generation (1978)
• The Establishment (1979)
• The Legacy (1981)
• Max (1982)
• The Outsider (1984)
• The Immigrant's Daughter (1985)
• 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)
• An Independent Woman (1997)
• Redemption (1999)
• Greenwich (2000) ISBN 0-15-100620-2
• Bunker Hill (2001)

The Masao Masuto Mysteries (as E. V. Cunningham)

• The Case of the Angry Actress (first titled Samantha 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)

Short stories

• "The First Men" (1960)
• "Time & the Riddle" thirty-one zen stories (1975)

External links

• Howard Fast at ISFDB
• trussel.com Howard Fast: Comprehensive Bibliography & Texts
• 1984, 1985, 1990 audio interviews at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim

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