>From: portsideMod at netscape.net
>
>HOWARD FAST (b. 1914)
>
>Alan Wald, Univ. of Michigan
>[from Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, eds., ENCYCLOPEDIA
>OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, (Urbana and Chicago: University
>of Illinois Press, 1992).]
>-------------------------------------------------------
>
>A prolific author of historical novels, biographies,
>popular histories, children's stories, film scripts,
>plays, detective fiction, science fiction, and "Zen
>Stories," Fast also wrote "entertainments" under the
>pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. In the 1940s, and again in
>the 1970s and 1980s, he achieved best-seller status
>with novels explicitly promoting left-wing ideas.
>Born the son of a factory worker in New York City, Fast
>dropped out of high school and published his first
>novel before he was twenty. Within a few years, he had
>issued more than half a dozen historical novels about
>the American Revolutionary War period, including
>Conceived in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished (1942),
>and Citizen Tom Paine (1943). The Last Frontier (1941)
>was an impressive effort to view the effects of the
>colonization of the continent from the viewpoint of
>native peoples.
>
>Fast was sympathetic to the antifascist movement and
>the Popular Front from the onset of his career. In 1943
>he joined the Communist Party. In the years of his
>membership, his most successful books were Freedom Road
>(1944), a novel of the Reconstruction era; The American
>(1946), a fictionalized biography of Illinois governor
>John Peter Altgeld, who pardoned three of the Haymarket
>anarchists; and Spartacus (1951), a drama of the 71
>B.C. slave revolt.
>
>In addition, Fast wrote less successful and more
>explicitly radical novels such as Clarktown (1947),
>concerning a Massachusetts strike; Silas Timberman
>(1954), depicting an academic victim of McCarthyism;
>and The Story of Lola Gregg (1956), describing the FBI
>pursuit and capture of a Communist labor activist.
>Among his Communist nonfiction writings, Literature and
>Reality (1950) is a vulgar treatise on Marxist
>criticism, Peekskill, (I.S.A.: A Personal Experience
>(1951) describes the 1949 attack of anticommunist
>rioters on a Paul Robeson concert; and The Passion of
>Sacco and Vanzetti (1953) eulogizes the martyred
>Italian anarchists.
>
>In 1950 the House Committee on Un-American Activities
>ordered Fast to provide the names of all those who had
>contributed to the support of a hospital for Spanish
>Republicans in Toulouse, France, with which he had been
>associated during the Spanish Civil War. When he
>refused, he was thrown in jail for three months.
>Blacklisted upon his release, he initiated his own
>publishing company, the Blue Heron Press. In 1952 he
>ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket,
>and in 1954 he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.
>
>Immediately following his sensational break with and
>public excoriation of the CP in The Naked God: The
>Writer and the Communist Party (1957), he moved to
>Hollywood to begin a new career as a scenarist.
>Nevertheless, by 1977 his popularity as a novelist was
>greater than ever when he wrote The Immigrants. The
>book was turned into a two-part television film and
>became the first of a pentalogy that was animated by
>left-liberal themes and traced an American family from
>the turn of the century through the Vietnam War era.
>
>http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/fast-
>bio.html
>
>
>
>Three Poems by Howard Fast
>--------------------------
>
>To Nazim Hikmet
>
>
>The way your own walls could not contain your words,
>so did they find us, my brother,
>nor could our walls exclude them.
>And there came to me that day in prison,
>speaking in the prison whisper you know so well,
>that gentle writer, Albert Maltz-
>Like you, his crime was words that sang of life,
>of peace and hope and the things men cherish-
>and told me you were free.
>Free, he said, Nazim Hikmet's free,
>and walks in freedom on his own good native ground,
>and sings loud and proud, for all men to hear.
>How can I tell you, friend, comrade, brother too,
>whom I have never seen but know so well,
>and hold so high, in such precious esteem-
>how can I tell you what this meant?
>For in that moment we were free.
>For in that moment my heart sang a song to equal yours,
>and I knew you as well as ever I knew a man,
>knew you and all your kind, our kind,
>such a brotherhood that surmounts nations,
>and they think to quiet us,
>to make us silent behind walls.
>A small blow once we struck in your behalf,
>yet I tell you that you freed us,
>two writers of a land five thousand miles from yours,
>like yours a land where evil men do evil things,
>like yours a land where freedom bows her head in shame,
>but will awaken yet.
>When you went free we understood
>the small moment of our own walls,
>erected by clowns and smirking killers,
>a small moment in the march of man toward light and
>glory-
>yet do I have to tell you,
>when surely you heard the song our hearts made!
>
>
>Masses & Mainstream - October 1950
>
>
>
>October Revolution
>
>THE little spark,
>touched by what suffering and what splendid endeavor,
>when I was only three, and lay in my mother's arms!
>Sleep gently, my child, oh, gently,
>the wild winds blow-sleep, and in your sleep
>will be a sound of men singing of tomorrow,
>where the red banners unfurl to the morning breeze.
>
>And now my own children sleep.
>Sleep, my children, sleep well,
>no care, and not for you
>shall there be the jail, the knouted whip, diverse
>terror;
>for it is October, my children,
>and far away men build in freedom-
>
>Ah, what shall I tell a Korean mother
>who holds a broken child in her arms?
>Ah, what shall I tell a Grecian maiden
>whose lover has gone to return no more?
>And my own children-
>what shall I tell them when I go away?
>
>If I go away, I will come again,
>for this is the time of dawning, of dawning.
>Your beautiful world will be like a garden,
>and pure will you grow in it,
>and proud will you stand in it,
>and when you reach out, you will touch my dreams.
>
>This is October, when the workers arose,
>and the red banners unfurled in the cleansing wind,
>and the sound of their singing was heard all over the
>world.
>
>Masses & Mainstream - November 1950
>
>
>
>A SONG OF PEACE
>
>
>I closed my eyes in darkness
>and opened them in light,
>and over the world,
>like a flag unfurled,
>was a sweet sound and a holy sight.
>
>A dove spread wings of magic;
>its shadow was golden and broad,
>and the people of earth,
>in a passion of birth,
>had shattered an ancient sword.
>
>Oh, why is my country hated
>and made such a thing of scorn,
>this fruitful place
>with its varied race,
>this land where I was born?
>
>And why is my country darkened,
>when the rest of the world is light,
>and cloaked in fear
>of things once dear,
>and weak in its frightful might?
>
>And why are the people silent,
>and where is the ancient song
>that mankind found
>was freedom's sound,
>to shatter injustice and wrong?
>
>We'll not have our country hated!
>Our country is strong and grand.
>Oh, be not dismayed
>by those who betrayed
>the heritage of our land.
>
>If a song can be made so simple,
>if a word can become a creed,
>then the sound of peace
>will gently increase,
>like the harvest from the seed.
>
>Ask not why the land is silent;
>let the people measure their toil,
>and the human race
>will share its grace
>with the lonely folk of our soil.
>
>Its grace is new and holy,
>and peace is the dream of the world,
>and the people of earth
>in a passion of birth
>will see their banner unfurled.
>
>The banner is pure and sacred,
>enough of the swine who destroy!
>Enough of the night,
>the world is bright-
>and the future is filled with-joy.
>
>Our cup is running over
>with the graft and the lies and the hate,
>and the renegade
>is too well paid
>with our broken dreams and our children's fate.
>
>We'll open our eyes in the darkness,
>and boldly look to the light,
>and call to our side
>with earnest pride
>our people who dwell in the night.
>
>And they'll see the dove so holy,
>so pure and wide of wing,
>wide as the earth
>in its passion of birth-
>with a joyful song to sing.
>
>And the lilt will be made so simple,
>and the word will become a creed,
>and the song of peace
>will gently increase,
>like the harvest from the seed.
>
>
>Korean Lullaby - 1951
>
>http://www.geocities.com/marxist_lb/howard_fast.htm
>
>
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