10 Facts About Howard Fast

Howard Melvin Fast was an American novelist and television writer.

Howard Fast's mother, Ida, was a British Jewish immigrant, and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who shortened his name from Fastovsky upon arrival in America.

Howard Fast credited his early voracious reading to a part-time job in the New York Public Library.

Always interested in American history, Howard Fast wrote The Last Frontier and Freedom Road.

Howard Fast spent World War II working with the United States Office of War Information, writing for Voice of America.

Blacklisted by major publishing houses following his release from prison, Howard Fast was forced to publish the novel himself.

Howard Fast subsequently established the Blue Heron Press, which allowed him to continue publishing under his own name throughout the period of his blacklisting.

In 1952, Howard Fast ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket.

Later that decade, Howard Fast broke with the Party over issues of conditions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, particularly after Nikita Khrushchev's report "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences" at a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, denouncing the personality cult and dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, and the Soviet military intervention to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in November.

Howard Fast married his first wife, Bette Cohen, on June 6,1937.