Over his long and colourful writing career, nothing slowed down Howard Fast. He was born of immigrant Ukrainian parents; his father worked in the New York garment trade and he held a series of part-time jobs until he sold his first bestseller, Conceived in Liberty, in 1939.
He was 16 when he sold his first short story, a sci-fi squib, to Amazing, and barely 18 when his first book was published. That was just the opening of the floodgates; on one of the few occasions when Fast expressed an opinion about his own talent, it was that he would run out of time before he ran out of stories. He finally did, earlier this week, dying peacefully in Connecticut at the age of 88.
Fast was a diehard Communist, whose eventual disillusionment with the regime in practice made no dent on his espousal of the ideology. He paid a high price for his beliefs, becoming one of the most high-profile casualties of the McCarthy witch hunts.
In 1952, by which time he had already written much of his bestselling historical fiction, libraries in the US were told to put Fast on the blacklist. His publishers were told to back off, and Fast ended up publishing one of his best-known books, Spartacus, independently.
Like Citizen Tom Paine and his saga about the Lavette family, which began with The Immigrants, Spartacus caught the public imagination. It was eventually turned into a film starring Kirk Douglas, who did a somewhat unconvincing imitation of a rebellious slave.
In the years when the blacklist held the US publishing and media industries in its death grip, Fast found another outlet for his talents. He turned to two of the genres that had fed his prolific reading habits as a child
