Angry
Actress
One-Penny
Orange
Russian
Diplomat
Poisoned
Eclairs
Sliding
Pool
Kidnapped
Angel
Murdered
Mackenzie
E.V. Cunningham's
Women
Between 1960 and 1973,
Howard Fast
published a dozen suspense-mystery novels
under the pseudonym E.V. Cunningham,
with titles which were women's names:
Sylvia
1960
Phyllis
1962
Alice
1963
Lydia
1964
Shirley
1964
Penelope
1965
Helen
1966
Margie
1966
Sally
1967
Samantha
1967
Cynthia
1968
Millie
1973
When I was a boy, I developed a passion
for Howard Fast's novels, and read all I
could find in my school library. Then, one
day, I no longer found his books. Fast was
blacklisted for being a member of the
American Communist Party...
"...in May 1952
The New York Times reported
intimidation of librarians across the nation by
Legionnaires, by Sons and Daughters of the
American Revolution, by Minutemen in Texas
and California. School texts showing city slums,
UNESCO material, all books by such threats to
the free world as
Howard Fast were purged
from school libraries." (
Victor Navasky, "The
Social Costs," in
Naming Names, Viking Press, New
York, 1980
)
Citizen Tom Paine
, formerly used as a school
text, was banned from use in NYC schools. In
1956 Fast broke with
the Communist Party, and
published his rationale in 1957 as
The Naked
God
. His 1990 memoir
Being Red
goes more
deeply into the issue.
Bibliography
Using my own extensive collection, various
on-line libraries, and book-dealer links, I have
compiled (actually, always in progress) a
comprehensive bibliography of his works,
including various editions, foreign language
editions, articles,
uncollected stories, films
made from his works, etc.
Clicking on the main title of a book displays the
text (blurb) of the original book jacket; clicking
on a title in the title index moves to that entry in
the main list.
Full texts
Many texts of entire stories and articles can
be accessed by clicking on the title, including
items from the '40s and '50s which don't appear
in any collections. Here you can find the entire
text of
his first published story,
Wrath of the
Purple
, which appeared in
Amazing Stories
magazine in October of 1932, and which was
never reprinted. You can read Fast's angry
responses to the injustices of the McCarthy era,
in his own
Crisis Papers (1951), modeled after
those of Tom Paine:
Crisis No. 1
,
Crisis No. 2
,
Crisis No.3
, his call to march in
May Day -
1951
,
his poetic eulogy,
Never to Forget: The
Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto
, as well as
pamphlets, journal articles, and columns he
wrote for the
Daily Worker,
Masses &
Mainstream, and other radical publications...
Now, all of Fast's
New Masses (Nov.'43 -
Sept.'47) and
Masses & Mainstream (June '48 -
April '57) articles and stories are online. And the
complete 21,000-word text of Fast's wartime (1944)
Tito and his
People
-- like the other texts here online, a difficult-to-find
document, seldom seen in libraries. A fascinating
background for
understanding today's situation in Yugoslavia...
A Howard Fast Bibliography
Howard Fast online texts
In the fall of 1996, Greenwood Press published Andrew
Macdonald's
Howard Fast: A Critical Companion
, including a
short biography, an overview of his work, and critical studies of
his major novels.
Howard Fast Portrait Album
: Dustjackets,
newspaper clips,
magazine stories... 1938-1997.
Some biographical material:
Noticing Howard Fast
by Daniel
Traister
Alan Wald's
biographical article
on Howard Fast
from the
Encyclopedia of the American
Left (1992)
A Recent Article by Fast:
Our
Unsingable Anthem
On the 1994 Symposium at the University of
Pennsylania:
The Politics of Culture in the Cold War Era
Two of Fast's
science-fiction stories:
The First Men (1960)
The Martian Shop (1959)
SPARTACUS, one of Fast's best-
known novels, was made into an
Academy-award winning movie
by Stanley Kubrick, starring Kirk
Douglas. The Web abounds with
reviews, and other sites related to
the movie, some of the best of
which are listed here:
Internet Movie Database
Roger Ebert
Frank Maloney
Duncan L. Cooper
Wayne Citrin
Chad Polenz
http://www.trussel.com/f_how.htm
Anthologies and Short-story Collections
Call of Fife and Drum: Three
Novels of the
Departure,
and other stories
Edge of Tomorrow
General Zapped an Angel; new
stories of fantasy
Howard Fast Reader; a
collection of stories and
Hunter and The Trap
Last Supper and Other Stories
Patrick Henry and the Frigate's
Keel, and other
Time and the Riddle: thirty-
one Zen stories
Touch of Infinity; thirteen new
stories of
1945.
Patrick Henry and the Frigate's Keel, and other stories of a young
nation
.
253 pp, 22 cm, 1st, [black cloth, gold lettering]. Duell, Sloan &
Pearce. New York. *
For
Rachel Ann Fast
Conceived as entertainment, pure and simple, these twelve
historical stories of the American past are superb examples of the
storyteller's art and of an art which, with seeming effortlessness,
brings to life again the days when the nation was young, when its
first great battles were fought, when the frontier reached
westward...
editions