FAST, Howard (Melvin) 1914-2003 (E. V. Cunningham, Walter Erickson)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 11, 1914, in New York, NY; died March 12, 2003, in Old Greenwich, CT. Author. Fast was an award-winning, bestselling novelist best known for his historical fiction, though he also wrote in other genres, such as crime and romance stories, as well as penning screenplays. Born to a poor family in New York City, Fast worked odd jobs to help support his family and began to write as a means of escape from his impoverished childhood. Although he completed high school, his only higher education came when he briefly attended the National Academy of Design. While he worked at a variety of jobs off and on during his lifetime, including as the owner of Blue Heron Press in New York during the 1950s and as chief news writer for the Voice of America from 1982 to 1984, his primary occupation was as an author. Fast sold his first story to Amazing Stories magazine when he was only seventeen years old, and he was publishing novels by the early 1930s, including Two Valleys (1933) and Strange Yesterday (1934). His first big success came with the historical novel Conceived in Liberty: A Novel of Valley Forge (1939), which was followed by other bestselling works, such as The Last Frontier (1941), The Unvanquished (1942), Citizen Tom Paine (1943), and Freedom Road (1944). Fast's career was interrupted by World War II, when he served with the U.S. Office of War Information, and again in 1950, when he suffered a setback after refusing to assist the House Un-American Activities Committee with its investigation into the Joint Anti-Fascist Reform Committee. Fast, who had been a member of the American Communist Party until he became disillusioned by the mass murders committed by Joseph Stalin in the USSR, was imprisoned for three months for his lack of cooperation. After his release, he had difficulty getting his next novel, Spartacus, published. Finally, he had to resort to self-publishing. Fortunately, the publishing house Doubleday offered to distribute some copies of the novel, which quickly took off as a bestseller and was adapted as a movie starring Kirk Douglas in 1960. Spartacus was followed by many more books by Fast, including The Winston Affair (1959), The Hunter and the Trap (1967), The Immigrants (1977), The Legacy (1980), The Pledge (1988), An Independent Woman (1997), and his last work of fiction, Greenwich (2000). Fast also wrote crime novels under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham (he wrote under various pseudonyms to circumvent his blacklisting) that featured a Nisei detective named Masao Masuto; he wrote plays such as Citizen Tom Paine (1986) and The Novelist (1991), the autobiography Being Red (1990), and a number of successful screenplays. Fast received many honors for his work, including, most notably, a Newspaper Guild award in 1947, a National Jewish Book Award in 1949, for My Glorious Brothers, the International Peace Price from the USSR in 1954, an Emmy Award in 1975 for an episode of the Benjamin Franklin television series, and the Prix de la Policia from France for his crime novels.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Novelists, seventh edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Writers Directory, 18th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2003.

periodicals

Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2003, p. B13.

New York Times, March 13, 2003, p. C12.

Times (London, England), March 20, 2003.