1. I quote the publisher's comment about Fast's youth from the dust wrapper preserved on a copy of the first edition of Two Valleys in the Howard Fast Collection, Department of Special Collections, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania. This collection is described briefly below. Sharpe, M. E. (Armonk, NY) published The Bridge Builder's Story.Google Scholar

For a brief survey of Fast's career, see the article (s.v. “Fast, Howard [b. 1914]”) by Wald, Alan, in Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Buhle, Mari Jo, Buhle, Paul, and Georgakas, Dan (New York: Garland, 1990), 219–20Google Scholar; hereafter cited as Encyclopedia. I have also used Fast's own autobiographical writings, especially Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990Google Scholar; hereafter cited as BR). As my text makes clear, I have also benefited from the opportunity of speaking about his life and career on several occasions with Fast.

2. Alan Wald comments on this productivity, but not warmly, in “The Legacy of Howard Fast.” Fast, he writes, “paid a heavy price for his machine-like production of books and screenplays.” This essay appeared originally in Radical Radical America 17 (1983)Google Scholar; it is reprinted in Wald, Alan M., The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1992), 92–101Google Scholar. I quote from the later text (99) and cite this essay hereafter as “Legacy.” Wald recalls that Granville Hicks wrote in 1945 to warn Fast that high-speed productivity might well depend on a degree of carelessness and inattentiveness from which his work would suffer. In 1956, Walter B. Rideout also spoke of the same problem (with somewhat more sympathy) in The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 275–85.Google Scholar

3. The general disinclination of American literary historians and critics not only to valorize but even to pay attention to writers emerging from the political Left is discussed by Cary Nelson. See his Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945, Wisconsin Project on American Writers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Yet even those for whom such a generalization seems valid may, perhaps, doubt its specific applicability to a writer such as Fast, whose prolific approach to his writing career has produced works of distinctly uneven quality. In any event, it is difficult at best to propose an explanation for neglect; there are so many possibilities. But consider the exemplary diction of Mark Shechner, writing that “the emergence of Jews as major contemporary writers had to await the 1940s, when a prevailing fiction of documentary realism and proletarian romance, produced by the likes of Cahan, Fuchs, Gold, Howard Fast, and Albert Halper, gave way to the subtler and more evocative writing of Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Norman Mailer, and a significant advance in articulateness, power, and modernity appeared to be at hand” (“Jewish Writers,” in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, ed. Hoffman, Daniel [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979], 193)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I suppose some readers may not feel that anything other than the “mere” passing of literary judgments - and certainly nothing that might, perhaps, be thought political (“the likes of”) - is at work in this passage even when they encounter the names of the five writers whom Shechner defenestrates. In truth, however, I fail to have an imagination capacious enough to envisage such readers.

4. Priscilla Murolo writes that the “rave reviews” accorded the book in which Fast first explained his departure from the Communist Party, The Naked God, in 1957 “signalled … [Fast's] reacceptance by the cultural establishment” (“History in the Fast Lane,” Radical History Review no. 31 [1984]: 23Google Scholar; cited hereafter as “History”). I cannot agree, seeing no evidence that Fast has been “reaccepted” by any “cultural establishment” whatsoever. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) maintains an online database that records scholarly and critical work undertaken by those who teach literature in our colleges and universities (and who, in current political mythology, are mostly demonized as the sort of left-wing subverters of accepted cultural norms for whom the Fasts of this world ought to be bread and butter). A search of this database for works that have Howard Fast as their subject yields, as of February, 1995, seven items. The database is retrospective and presently extends back to 1963. To put this figure into some perspective, contrast it with the number of scholarly books and articles that the same database lists that, published during the same thirty-two-year period, concern other modern American writers of varied stature and status: for example, Flannery O'Connor, 850; John Crowe Ransom, 146; Stephen King, 120; Isaac Asimov, 60; and Ross Macdonald, 52. Macdonald, a popular mystery writer and the least studied member of this group, is the subject of more than seven times the number of publications devoted to Fast. In fairness, I should note that the MLA database does not turn up the articles on Fast by Wald or Murolo published in history journals that MLA does not index. Nonetheless, these figures reliably indicate the degree of “reacceptance” - that is, virtually none - Fast has attained since he left the Party.

Alan Wald notices this lapse of scholarly attention when he comments in passing that “we have not even made a rudimentary beginning of an examination of the major contributions of leftist writers to the historical novel (for example, … Howard Fast)” (Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics [London: Verso, 1994], 79).Google Scholar

5. As a novel, The Children appeared over the Duell, Sloan and Pearce imprint (New York, 1947). It was reprinted once again in The Howard Fast Reader: A Collection of Stories and Novels (New York: Crown, 1960).Google Scholar

6. This is a view that deserves expansion; I hope to expand it in a different framework than that permitted by a survey such as this one. One might nonetheless note that, in BR, Fast bathes the book in false and partly misleading bathos. In the memoir, he writes that The Children “was the only time, in all my long life as a writer, that I wrote of my childhood”; but since then, he concludes, and “even in a dispassionate telling in my old age, I find that walls separate me from the intensity of the suffering of those three more or less abandoned children, myself and my brothers” (43). Readers who know no more of The Children than what the self-absorbed memoirist says of it here may decide on this basis that it sounds like a book they can easily live without. If so, they will miss a book at once more coldblooded, dispassionate, yet attuned to others, than its own author remembered in 1990.

7. See, for instance, Fast, Howard, The Story of the Jews in the United States, Jewish Information Series, no. 1 (New York, 1942)Google Scholar, “for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States”; and his Patrick Henry and the Frigate's Keel (n.p., 1945; the Armed Services edition reprint).

8. Daniel Aaron writes, briefly and perceptively, about some of the limitations of The Naked God in his Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961; rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 311.Google Scholar

9. Wald calls this work simply “a vulgar treatise on Marxist criticism” (Encyclopedia, 219)Google Scholar. That may well be a justified criticism. Nonetheless, anyone who, considering the small number of representative articles, pamphlets, and tracts cited in the text as examples of Fast's occasional writings (and among which this reference to Literature and Reality is found), and who has even a slight sense of the vast number of other such ephemeral pieces Fast produced, may well suppose that, however vulgar any of these pieces may be, getting them controlled bibliographically would benefit all students of leftist thought in Fast's era. A serious bibliography of Fast's entire output would be even more valuable; he used many names and published in an enormous variety of venues. Questions such as the one Wald asks (see note 4) about the reception of Fast's historical fictions simply cannot receive a serious answer without this preliminary basic information.

10. Goodman, Walter provides a brief overview of the background to this affair in The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 176–81Google Scholar, as does Caute, David, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 177–78.Google Scholar

11. Fast wrote several times to explain his resignation from the Communist Party: see, for example, “An Exchange with Howard Fast,” Mainstream 10Google Scholar; 3 (March 1957): 29–47 (Fast's “My Decision” followed by the Editors' “Comment”); “On Leaving the Communist Party,” Saturday Review 40Google Scholar; 46 (November 16, 1957): 15–17, 55–58; and “The Writer and the Commissar,” Prospectus 1Google Scholar; 1 (November 1957): 31–57.

12. The resentments that Fast's conversion elicited among his former comrades on the Left must have been at least slightly exacerbated because of his former and fairly prominent role as a sort of “enforcer” of Party discipline. His participation in the correction of Albert Maltz, who fell into ideological error with respect to the question of the potential independence of the artist from adherence to political orthodoxy, is an oft-told tale (see, for example, Aaron, , Writers on the Left, 386–90)Google Scholar. This affair took place in 1946. Earlier still, Fast played a role in keeping Joseph Freeman's 1943 novel Never Call Retreat from being filmed because Freeman, who had broken with the Party in 1939, was regarded as a renegade; this matter is mentioned in Starobin, Joseph R., American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957 (1972; rept. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 253–54 (n. 32).Google Scholar

13. Wald, (“Legacy,” 96)Google Scholar notes that the “left-liberal doctrine” with which Fast infuses these books “is not just simplified but fatally trivialized” by Fast's failure “to address the civil rights of those who were real ‘subversives’ in the eyes of the witch-hunters.” Instead, he portrays only simple innocents who are framed by McCarthyites. Fast criticizes “excesses and abuses,” not “the entire process.”

14. Fast was no academic; but neither were the issues he raised in Silas Timberman matters he could afford to find “purely academic.” Schrecker, Ellen W. usefully recalls Fast's experiences as a speaker barred from appearances at various universities in No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 91–93.Google Scholar

15. One of these columns provided an occasion for one of the relatively rare bits of knuckle-rapping notice Fast can still attract from the right (Being Red was to provide another occasion, of course). See Buckley, William F. Jr., “Mr. Fast Explains,” National Review 41Google Scholar; 3 (February 24, 1989), 62–63, where Buckley explains how Fast, writing about abortion, fails to grasp significant distinctions between a fetus's right to life and the forfeiture of claims to the same right by a person convicted of a capital crime.

16. Wald writes that books such as Clarkton, Silas Timberman, and Lola Gregg were “less successful and… explicitly more radical” than Fast's earlier novels. He says that Freedom Road, The American (1946)Google Scholar, and Spartacus were the “most successful” of Fast's books while he was a Party member (Encyclopedia, 219).Google Scholar

17. Since Wald wrote these words in 1983, a few other self-published bestsellers have appeared. They remain uncommon enough to warrant notice in the New York Times (see, for example, McDowell, Edwin, “The Rise of the Self-Published Best Seller,” 07 9, 1990, D6).Google Scholar

18. Fast used other pseudonyms, as well. In BR (159–61)Google Scholar, for instance, he tells of his use of the name Simon Kent for a story whose title he remembered as “A Child is Lost,” published and then often reprinted under that name at a time when his own name would have killed sales. “The Day Our Child Was Lost,” by Simon Kent, appears - “Condensed from This Week magazine” - in Catholic Digest 15Google Scholar; 4 (February 1951): 38–40 at a time when that magazine would have reprinted nothing “by Howard Fast.”

See my comment at the end of note 9. Until Fast's vast output has been given basic bibliographical attention, we remain unclear about both its extent and its reception, even when (perhaps especially when) those who were “receiving” it were uncertain or simply wrong about whose work they were reading.

19. Thus they unwittingly betrayed their vast distance from the arenas in which literary status was conferred - arenas where, for all practical purposes, Fast no longer had any reputation proximity to which could enhance the status of their own product. Nonetheless - to cite three literally random examples - Fast is prominently named on the covers of the March, 1959; November, 1959; and February, 1960, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; two of those covers also give the title of the story to be found within.

20. I owe this recollection to a private communication from Professor Felscher.

21. Like The Children, this is a book to which I hope to return on another occasion. I would, however, draw attention, if to nothing else, at least to the restraint Fast shows in developing the characters in this novel. His use of ellipsis, his refusal to “explain” them, is masterful. Fast never opens up the relationship of his narrator - a Roman Catholic physician - to his Puritan neighbors (and his Puritan wife) or to the Quakers also resident in the neighborhood. These relationships, and that between the narrator and his wife especially, remain among many sources of fruitful mystery in this book - and, I think, among the sources of its power.

As Wald, among others, has noticed (see note 2), Fast is too prolific. He is thus easy to underestimate. Not only has he written too much (who has read it all?), but also his most interesting books are not always his best-known books. The reader who concentrates on the latter may not invariably meet the former. On the other hand, of course, the ways in which Fast's various books have been received is itself a topic that would repay further study; it might by itself offer a kind of roadmap to U.S. literary politics over a large chunk of the 20th Century.

22. Barbara Foley is not alone in distinguishing between Fast's earlier and his later versions of this tale of disengagement. See her Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 220 n. 6.Google Scholar