Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane (The Modern Jewish Experience) - Hardcover

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) * Fame-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 *

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.