Howard Melvin Fast (November 11, 1914 – March 12, 2003) was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under the pen names E. V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson.
Early life
Fast was born in
New York City. His mother, Ida (née Miller), was a
British Jewish immigrant and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant whose name was shortened from Fastovsky upon arrival in the
USA. When his mother died in 1923 and his father became unemployed, Howard's youngest brother,
Julius, went to live with relatives, while he 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, published in 1933 when he was 18. 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.
[edit]Contribution to Constitutionalism
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 by major publishing houses following his release from prison, Fast was forced to publish the novel himself. By the standards of a self-published book, it was a great success, going through seven printings in the first four months of publication. (According to Fast in his memoir, 50,000 copies were printed, of which 48,000 were sold.) He subsequently established the Blue Heron Press, which allowed him to continue publishing under his own name throughout the period of his blacklisting. Just as the production of the film version of “Spartacus” (released in 1960) is considered a milestone in the breaking of the Hollywood blacklist, the reissue of Fast’s novel by Crown Publishers in 1958 effectively ended his own blacklisting within the American publishing industry.
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 1960, Fast began writing mystery/detective novels under the name “E.V. Cunningham”; the decision to adopt a pseudonym was not related to his blacklisting, but was a common practice for writers wishing to disassociate their “serious” writing from their genre fiction. (
Gore Vidal, for instance, wrote mysteries as “Edgar Box.”) Fast published nineteen novels as "Cunningham," the best-known of which are the Masao Masuto mysteries, seven books featuring a
Nisei detective with the
Beverly Hills, California Police Department. Fast also published occasionally under the names Behn Boruch, Walter Ericson, and Simon Kent.
[edit]Personal life
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 already had three sons. He died in
Old Greenwich,
Connecticut on March 12, 2003.
