SOURCE: “Noticing Howard Fast,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, edited by Jack Salzman, Vol. 20, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 525-41.

In the following essay, Traister provides an overview of Fast's life, literary career, political consciousness, and popularity, drawing attention to the need for critical reevaluation of Fast's numerous works and their significance.

I. Introduction

In 1933, Dial Press in New York published Two Valleys, the first novel by a very young man named Howard Melvin Fast. The publisher's blurb noted that “Mr. Fast is not yet nineteen.” (He had been born in 1914.) In 1995, The Bridge Builder's Story, the most recent of Howard Fast's novels, appeared.¹ Sixty-two years lie between Two Valleys and The Bridge Builder's Story.

During this interval, Fast has produced an uncommonly large oeuvre for an American writer with claims on serious attention. He has written books in several genres; stories equally varied and...