As a storyteller, Fast has his greatest appeal: his knack for sketching lifelike characters and creating brisk, action-packed narratives has always insured him a wide readership, despite occasionally slipshod writing.
His first novel, Two Valleys (1933), written when Fast was eighteen and working as a page at the New York Public Library, is a fast-moving tale of bloodshed, romance, and thrilling escapes, set on the frontier during the American Revolution. Critics found this work "unusually successful" in reflecting the "terror and beauty of the wilderness," and in conveying "the feeling of a future full of limitless possibilities," an encouraging sign for its precocious author. While his over-ambitious second novel, Strange Yesterday (1934), bogged down trying to trace five generations of an American family from the Revolutionary War days to the present, such accomplished works as The Last Frontier (1941), The Unvanquished (1942), and Citizen Tom Paine (1943) established Fast's reputation as a gifted and compelling author of historical fiction.
Typical of Fast's unusual treatment and perspective was a novel for juveniles called Haym Salomon, Son of Liberty (1941), a semi-fictional life story of a Polish-Jewish broker and financier who helped the American cause during the Revolution.
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