In the american popular imagination, the 1950s and 1960s stand in stark juxtaposition. The conformity of the 1950s contrasts with the rebelliousness of the 1960s. Consumerism was undermined by the challenge of youthful antimaterialism. Repressed sexuality gave way to sexual liberation. Political centrism yielded to polarization. A homogeneous mass culture fragmented into balkanized cultures. Consensus broke down into irrepressible conflict. For conservatives, the 1950s serve as a symbolic “golden age,” an era that atavistic (and terribly forgetful) Americans evoke when pondering current economic, cultural, and social problems. For those on the Left, the 1950s remain the “dark ages” of repression, corporate domination, and racial and sexual subordination.

Alan Wald: When we read your memoir that came out in 1990, Being Red, many of us had also read an earlier book called The Naked God in 1957 — and our impression of your experience was represented by The Naked God until we read Being Red. There seems to many of us to be a big difference between the two books and it is also noticed by some of us that in your long list of books in front of Being Red you don't mention The Naked God, and in Being Red you don't talk about The Naked God. So we are wondering whether or not Being Red is sort of a new version of the past that is appropriate for some reason. Is there something inadequate, perhaps, about the earlier version or some political need now to rethink and reform your ideas? What are the differences between the two books? Why did you write the second?

Howard Fast: The chief difference is thirty-five years — which is a big difference. When I wrote The Naked God, I was very angry. I was furious with what I considered a betrayal of people of good will by a large part of the leadership of the Communist Party. You see, I do not look upon the destruction of the Soviet Union and the careers of the men who led the Soviet Union as an attempt to establish a tyranny.

In 1933, Dial Press in New York published Two Valleys, the first novel by a very young man named Howard Melvin Fast. The publisher's blurb noted that “Mr. Fast is not yet nineteen.”(He had been born in 1914.) In 1995, The Bridge Builder's Story, the most recent of Howard Fast's novels, appeared. Sixty-two years lie between Two Valleys and The Bridge Builder's Story.