FAST, HOWARD MELVIN

FAST, HOWARD MELVIN (1914–2003), U.S. author, best known for his imaginative historical novels as well as detective fiction published under the name E.V. Cunningham. Fallen Angel (1951) was published under the name of Walter Ericson. Born and educated in New York City, Fast spent the Depression years of the 1930s working in many parts of the U.S. at various jobs. Some early novels had no success, but in 1937 his story The Children attracted favorable notice when it appeared in Story magazine. When his Place in the City was published in the same year, Fast quickly gained recognition. A number of his works deal with American history, notably Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished (1942), Citizen Tom Paine (1943), Freedom Road (1944), and April Morning (1961). Fast also wrote on themes involving injustice, as in The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1953), and on oppression as in The Last Frontier (1942), an epic account of an American Indian tribe's attempted flight to Canada and in Spartacus (1952). During the years 1943–56 Fast was an active member of the American Communist Party, and in 1950 he was jailed for contempt of Congress. One of the leading American leftist writers of the 1950s, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. The later excesses of the Stalin regime disillusioned him, however, and he explained his break with Communism in The Naked God (1957). Despite his political activities, Fast wrote a number of books on Jewish themes, including Haym Salomon: Son of Liberty (1941), a young people's biography of the American Revolution's financier. Two other historical works were Romance of a People (1941) and a Picture-Book History of the Jews (1942), written in collaboration with his wife. My Glorious Brothers (1949), generally considered one of Fast's outstanding novels, retells the story of the Maccabean revolt, while Moses, Prince of Egypt (1958) was planned as the first of a series of works on the life of the great lawgiver. In his "Immigrants" novels, Fast studies, against a vast sweep of modern American history, beginning with the last part of the 19th century, the interweaving destinies and social mobility of immigrant families, one of them being the Levy progeny. Fast's television scriptwriting resulted in his receiving an Emmy award from the U.S. National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1977. His autobiography, Being Red, appeared in 1990. His novel The Bridge Builder's Story (1995) traces a young gentile man's acceptance of his own life as he finds understanding through identification with both the suffering and survival of Jews in the Holocaust. Scott Waring's maturation, achieved through analysis, is a liberation from the past and an ability to create a life that comports with this new-found freedom. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Current Biography (April, 1943) S.V. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. Macdonald, Howard Fast: A Criticial Companion (1996). (Harold U. Ribalow / Rohan Saxena and Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)