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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.
1. “The Politics of Culture in the Cold War Era” conference was held on 03 23, 1994Google Scholar, at the University of Pennsylvania, with funding from the Thomas S. Gates Fund and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and support from the Departments of History and English at the University of Pennsylvania. For their role in the preparation of the conference, Michael Ryan, Daniel Traister, and Al Filreis deserve special thanks.
2. For detail on Fast's career, see Fast, Howard, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).Google Scholar There is no full-length biography of Fast, nor a complete study of his work, but useful information may be found in Murolo, Priscilla, “History in the Fast Lane,” Radical History Review 31 (1984): 22–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wald, Alan, “Pictures of the Homeland: The Legacy of Howard Fast,” Radical America 17 (1983)Google Scholar; Wald, Alan, “Howard Fast,” in The Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed, Buhle, Mari Jo, Buhle, Paul, and Georgakas, Dan (New York: Garland, 1990), 219–220Google Scholar; and the exhibition catalogue by Traister, Daniel, Being Read (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Library, Department of Special Collections, 1994).Google Scholar
3. For an overview of the historiography of Reconstruction, see Foner, Eric, “Reconstruction Revisited,” in The Promise of American History, ed. Kutler, Stanley and Katz, Stanley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 82–100.Google Scholar Fast, who published W. E. B. DuBois's classic The Souls of Black Folks under the imprint of his Blue Heron Press in the early 1950s, was clearly influenced by DuBois's classic Black Reconstruction (1932)Google Scholar, a book that, despite its scope and importance, was not reviewed by the American Historical Review after it was published. On Fast's historical novels, see especially Murolo, “History in the Fast Lane.”
4. Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
