There is neither confusion nor stylistic nonsense in Howard Fast's "Freedom Road," which has at once the virtues and the defects of a cleanly written political tract. Mr. Fast, in adding another volume to his series of American historical novels, sets out to right the balance on the Reconstruction Period in South Carolina, which, following the precedent of Pike's "The Prostrate State," has been set down in one book after another as a horrible record of Negro, Carpetbagger and Scalawag ignorance, brutality and corruption….

But Mr. Fast's account of Gideon Jackson's rise from slave to statesman and the experiment in racial and social democracy on what had been the Carwell plantation never achieves "the solidity of specification" (the phrase is Henry James') that we have come to demand of fiction. It lacks dimension, depth, above all [saturation in its materials]…. (p. 196)

Mr. Fast has written a useful democratic...