Description
Book SynopsisIlluminates 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
Trade ReviewFame-hungry, wealth-obsessed, with a voracious appetite for women, bestselling author Howard Fast rose from the hardscrabble streets of his 1920s New York childhood to become a popular author and, perhaps more improbably, 'the public face of the Communist Party in America.' In Sorin's intriguing if dense new biography, Fast's life becomes an excellent prism through which to view the history of leftist activity in the years straddling WWII, along with the anticommunism hysteria of the 1940s and '50s. . . . A notable study of a thorny protagonist whose life has much to reveal about the times in which he lived and about the interplay of political belief, personal identity, art, and ambition.
* Publishers Weekly *
Sorin . . . has written a heavily researched critical biography of Fast. . . The volume's strength is its explication and analysis of the complex social and political context of Fast's activism and creative work. . . . Sorin's lengthy critique of Fast's adherence to Communism long after most American writers and intellectuals had abandoned the party, and his shameful public silence on Stalin's crimes and Soviet anti-Semitism, are of significant import. . . . Recommended.
* Choice *
An intriguing biography, not least for its examination of how Fast interwove his political activism, his Jewishness and his art during the heyday of McCarthyism. Recommended.
* Recorder (Melbourne) *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1 Paradise Postponed
Publish or Perish
Politics Delayed
2 The War Against Fascism
The Fatal Embrace
The Reds and the Blacks
3 The Life of the Party
Innocent Abroad
The Road Not Taken
The Politics of Literature
4 Cold War, Hot Seat
The Discouraged American
Down and Out in the USA
5 Banned, Barred, and Beseiged
It Can't Happen Here
War and Peace
6 The Myopia of American Communism
Foley Square Follies
Waltzing at the Waldorf
April in Paris
The Poison of Peekskill
7 Literature and Reality
Howard Fast: Prisoner
Great Expectations
8 Free! But Not at Last
9 Trials and Tribulations
Despair, Distraction, and Defeat
The Push and Pull of Politics
Confrontations Left and Right
10 McCarthyism, Stalinism, and the World according to Fast
11 Culture and the Cold War
To Flee or not to Flee
An Even Brighter Star in the USSR
Signs of Thaw in the Cold War?
12 Things Fall Apart; the Left Doesn't Hold
13 Fast Forward
14 Life in the Fast Lane
California to the New York Island
Looking Backward, Seeing Red
15 Fast and Loose
Disappointment and Despair
Fast in Pursuit
16 Fall and Decline
Notes
Index
