Howard Fast: Life and Literature in
the Left Lane
Gerald Sorin
Indiana
University Press, 2012. 528 pp.
US$40.00
Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble
Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books,
rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen
Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus,
Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal
member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress.
Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections
among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and
explains Fast's attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as
long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with
its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success,
Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern
Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political
myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics
in 20th-century America.
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