In the following essay, Macdonald provides an overview of Fast's life, literary career, and numerous published works, drawing attention to the recurring preoccupations and unifying themes that link the author's biography and fiction.

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.

In the following interview, Fast discusses his life, literary activities, the Communist Party and his involvement in that organization, and his memoirs The Naked God and Being Red.

In the following review, Meyer discusses Fast's political involvements and offers tempered assessment of Being Red, which he describes as “readable and useful” though “inaccurate” and evasive.

In the following negative review of Being Red, Kanfer condemns Fast's “disingenuous” account of his life and the Communist Party.

In the following negative review of Being Red, Radosh criticizes Fast's involvement in the Communist Party and discrepancies in his recollection of such activities.

In the following essay, Trescott provides an overview of Fast's life, literary career, and critical reception, including Fast's own comments on these subjects.

In the following review, Howe objects to Fast's Communist loyalties and offers unfavorable analysis of The Naked God.

In the following review of Being Red, Braudy commends Fast's insight into political history, though he finds fault in his reticence concerning his personal life and motivations.

The vision of a utopian future guided Fast through fiction and communism…. Fast never has been clear about how to attain this utopia. At first, he assumed that the example of early America would lead the world there, and he set out to glorify the American Revolution in a series of novels. Misunderstanding much of its character, he viewed the Revolution solely as the beginning of a world struggle for liberty. Later, dissatisfied with the state of political freedom in twentieth-century America, he also...

In the following review of Being Red, Sigal commends Fast's accounts of his persecution, though finds fault in his sentimentality and lack of insight.

In the following review of Being Red, Koenig provides an overview of Fast's life and literary career.

In the following review, Kilian discusses Fast's stage version of Citizen Tom Paine and actor Richard Thomas's lead performance as Paine.

In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt offers positive evaluation of The Dinner Party, though he finds fault in Fast's lack of literary sophistication.

In the following review of Being Red, Hitchens praises Fast's engaging recollections, though he finds fault in his writing.

In the following interview, Fast discusses his life, political concerns, and The Dinner Party.

In the following excerpted review, Cook praises the authenticity of The Pledge, though finds fault in Fast's literary ability.

In the following review, Sheppard offers unenthusiastic assessment of The Immigrants. “Unfortunately,” writes Sheppard, “Fast's life contains more dramatic and moral conflict than his new novel.”

In the following review, McLellan offers unfavorable assessment of The Dinner Party.

In the following review, Savage offers negative assessment of The Dinner Party.

In the following review, Mayberry offers positive assessment of Citizen Tom Paine, though notes the work's limitations.

[In "The Unvanquished" Mr. Fast makes George Washington's greatness] human and credible. Describing the retreat from New York in 1776—and describing it through Washington's eyes, a feat attempted by no other novelist of our time—he presents a series of disasters never mentioned in the schoolbooks…. Without [all the necessary details that Mr. Fast supplies,] we cannot understand the meaning of ritualistic phrases like "father of his country" or &...

In the following review, Rubin offers a qualified endorsement of The Outsider.

Howard Fast is a historical novelist known for "Spartacus," "Citizen Tom Paine," "Freedom Road," "The American." If he is a chronicler of some of mankind's most glorious moments, he is also a register of some of our more senseless deeds. His newest novel, "The Hessian," is a hard flint chip of a story, a shard preserved from the American Revolution. Mr. Fast holds up his flint to the present and says, in effect, this is what war do...

Mr. Fast gives us a liberal mixture [of stories in "Departure and Other Stories,"] and every time you might think you have him summed up the next story will be something different again. But let it be said that he never fails to be fluently readable and that always (or almost always) he has a story to tell. Out of these nineteen stories, though, certain groupings can be discerned. There are three, for instance, that deal with the frontier. I think it is a true accomplishment to be able to give...

[In "The Immigrants"] Fast charts the rise of a poor boy—in this case second generation Italian-French immigrant Dan Lavette—to the top of corporate power and money and back down again…. "The Immigrants" moves fast. Several of the characters are stock and predictable, such as Dan's wife, the wealthy, beautiful, but frigid Jean. Yet the action drives along at such a pace that the reader is entertained by events, if not always by the characters involved ...

[Thomas] Paine is a good subject for a historical novelist; a master controversialist, he lived one of the stormiest of lives, and his picturesque career ended in tragedy…. But much in Paine's mind and character remains unknown, and the historical novelist has scope for original interpretation. He can well present Paine as a hero—and Mr. Fast does so; he can with good reason paint him as one of the liberators of the human mind. The best element in [Citizen Tom Paine] is the portrait of ...

I propose Howard Fast as one of America's most important historical novelists. For one thing, he is almost alone in his ability to relate a historical narrative in around three hundred pages, so reading him amounts to something less than a lifework. More weighty, however, is the fact that he always penetrates to the heart of our history. His interest lies in the projection of meaningful men involved in a meaningful situation. His mind has a clarity which is almost cold at times and never charming. Yo...

Choose a well-worn homily ("God works in strange ways"); mix in a headline from the morning's newspaper ("Public Works Kickback Revealed, Four City Councilmen Implicated"); add a twist of the fantastic ("I propose to buy off God"); and blend carefully into a light, tasty dish; alter the ingredients slightly and blend again; repeat eleven more times and serve. The result is a thirteen-course dinner, each course a dessert—Howard Fast's "A T...

Howard Fast's "The Immigrants" concerns French, Italian, Irish and Chinese immigrants in turn-of-the-century San Francisco…. Fast never parades his research, but each scene stands on firm detail. One of his best novels (he's produced about 60 books), it spans 40 years. It's also the opener of a [series] that is likely to be Fast's big bid for recognition as an artist. He does a lot of things right in this novel…. I always fear that a Fast novel is prov...

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, Carpet...

Before I reached the midpoint of Howard Fast's new novel [Torquemada] I was prepared to subhead this review "For Ages 12 to 16." Most of the paragraphs could be used verbatim as captions in a children's encyclopedia. The excursion into Spain, when the Dominican prior Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498) served as generalissimo of the Inquisition, the cardboard cutouts used as "set pieces," the grimly-telegraphed story-line, seemed parts of the same pattern,...

If [Upton] Sinclair's chief contribution to modern American fiction was to help establish the novel of contemporary history, Fast's has been to show how an already established form, the traditional historical novel, may be used for radical ends. The conception basic to most of his work is a dialectic of revolutionary development whereby certain past events are viewed as acts in the extended drama of mankind's struggle toward a classless society. Fasts's type-story is that of a re...

To the ever-increasing number of books that deal with the events and the personages of our own brief American past, Howard Fast has made an interesting and valuable addition with his fictionalized biography of Thomas Paine. In Citizen Tom Paine he has succeeded, to a laudable degree, not only in sketching a vivid portrait of one of the most extraordinary figures of the eighteenth century, but in projecting it against the stormy background of the times in which he lived and played a part, whose importance ha...

To be effective, Torquemada would have to do either (preferably both) of two things: document in full the spiritual shame and social inanition of late 15th-century Spain or guess its way into the mind of Thomas the Grand Inquisitor himself. Unaccountably, it does neither, and the resulting narrative—thin without austerity, superficial without even the pomp of surfaces—is curiously flavorless. Perhaps Mr. Fast is trying for a bleak epitome, a skeletal slap in the face. His plot suggests as much...

I respect Howard Fast as one of the ablest and most patriotic of our novelists, and I see in … Freedom Road, a valiant effort to inform us of a period when, in the aftermath of the Civil War, blind emotionalism and black hatred defeated the very ideals for which our ablest men had been fighting…. In the writing of Freedom Road, Mr. Fast the historian has sometimes been outmaneuvered by Mr. Fast the moralist…. The moralist in Mr. Fast reminds me at times of John Bunyan. His Gideon is a p...

[The Immigrants] slides down easily, like a friendly if unexceptional Napa wine. All the elements of popular American mythology are offered up for tasting…. The characters of this novel are doers, as Fast never tires of pointing out, and are little given to introspection. The mildly annoying conceit that people "do what they do" because they "are what they are" serves ultimately as a rationalization for the fact that the first generation parvenus are wrecked financially, w...

Mr. Fast's repentance [for his support of Communism is set forth in The Naked God,] a tiny masterpiece of urgent, diamond-hard prose. He tells of the gradual destruction of a writer's personality by the Party, and of his slow and agonised remaking of himself. Once again we see how Communism works to stamp out the last trace of individuality in its adherents in those lands where it is unable to take their lives; once again we see the parade of inbred lunacy that is the American, as it is the Br...

[E. V. Cunningham's] "The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs" presents Sergeant Masuto with a case in which somebody is handing out poison goodies…. Masuto solves this case as he has solved the others in the past—through footwork, intuition, Zen philosophy and meditation. It also helps that he has Japanese friends and relatives all over the place, all of them wise, subtle and as intuitive as Masuto himself. Masuto gets into his usual trouble with his superiors and with the Los A...

The American Colonies during the days of the Revolution are the setting for [Two Valleys]…. Mr. Fast is unusually successful in conveying the mood and impression he depicts. He possesses also the knack of creating lifelike characters; his leading figures in their outlines have reality and act on their own volition, and the minor figures emerge as distinct individualities. The settled Pennsylvania village, with its Quaker meeting house and Lutheran church, is effectively contrasted with the wilderness...

[Ultimately, The Establishment] seems to be a story about values and about the way people function in the modern world. At one point Barbara reflects that she has "done her share to make this snake pit men call civilization a little more tolerable." In various ways this is what the people of good will in this book seek to do. Against them we have the Establishment, "those who are so enormously rich and powerful that they control the state." A politician named Drake and a group of...

[E. V. Cunningham's "The Case of the One-Penny Orange"] is the first of a series with a Nisei detective…. [An] investigation takes him into the world of rare stamps…. The trail leads back to World War II and the Gestapo, and there is plenty of excitement before Masuto wraps everything up. Masuto is an interesting addition to the current crop of detectives. He is a very modern Oriental, generations removed from Charlie Chan (though he does murmur "Ah, so" at f...

The Spanish inquisition, and the Grand Inquisitor himself, are the subjects of Torquemada, a brief, intense, and thoroughly disappointing novel…. Mr. Fast is here confronting powerful themes: the passions that lead men to do evil in the name of God and the Good, the meaning of freedom of conscience. But the treatment is heavy-handed, rigid, portentous, abstract. Mr. Fast does not appear to be at home in the Spanish milieu…. In art, impossibilities that are made to seem likely are much more eff...

[Detective Masao Masuto is back again in E. V. Cunningham's "The Case of the Russian Diplomat"] and this book is every bit as good as its predecessor. The case involves a dead man in the swimming pool of a posh Beverly Hills hotel…. Masuto, a Zen Buddhist and karate expert, a super-efficient cop, can be as tough as they come. Mr. Cunningham wastes no time with extraneous materials. He sticks close to the plot, builds up the action suspensefully and gleefully knocks down a clay pi...

The entanglements of the Lavette family, which unfolded in three previous novels (The Immigrants, Second Generation, The Establishment), are subtly, neatly recalled throughout [The Legacy]. As in the past two novels, Fast focuses on Dan Lavette's dynamic daughter, Barbara, whose amorous, feminist, and antiwar ("Mothers for Peace") activities form the central action of the novel. The novelist also gives prominent attention to the third generation of Lavettes…. As usual the clan me...

"The Immigrants" and "Second Generation" were best sellers, and Fast hasn't changed his recipe for this latest volume ["The Establishment"] in the chronicle of the San Francisco Lavettes. There's the same smooth blending of individual and socio-political history, the same firm story line with crises neatly spaced along it, almost the same cast of characters…. The story lacks real punch, but it will certainly entertain those who are entertained b...

Lucid characterizations, with an enthralling, if somewhat imitative plot, describe Second Generation,… [which traces] the lives, loves and tragedies of various California families in this century. A sequel to The Immigrants, the years comprising this novel—1934–46—lend to the direct and indirect hardships suffered among the Lavettes, the Levys, the Casalas, and their kin…. What makes this book enjoyable is Fast's development of the supporting characters while keepin...

E. V. Cunningham tackles a world-shaking theme in the manner of a slick romance in Phyllis…. Why is Sgt. Tom Clancy, N.Y.P.D. posing as an assistant professor of physics at Knickerbocker University? The answer, gradually revealed, is startling, and the ensuing action effective. There are the ingredients of a superior (if hardly credible) thriller here—if only so much of the dialogue did not seem to have escaped from a women's magazine or even from daytime television. (p. 22)