Howard Fast

Best-selling author of 'Spartacus'

Howard Melvin Fast, writer: born New York 11 November 1914; married 1937 Bette Cohen (died 1994; one son, one daughter), 1999 Mimi Dennis; died Old Greenwich, Connecticut 12 March 2003.

The writer Howard Fast is best known as the author of Spartacus, the novel that Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick turned into an epic movie in 1960. Yet, over a 70-year writing career Fast wrote more than 80 books which sold over 80 million copies around the world.

He was a Communist and in 1953 became the only American apart from Paul Robeson to receive the Stalin International Peace Prize. Three years later, he left the Communist Party when Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin's murderous ways.

Fast was remarkable for the way that he combined left-wing political commitment with page-turning prose in such bestsellers as Citizen Tom Paine (1943) and Freedom Road (1944). Sometimes he let didacticism get the better of him, for instance in novels such as Clarkton (1947), about a textile-mill strike, and Silas Timberman (1954), about an academic victim of McCarthyism – but that was all part of his political commitment.

Howard Melvin Fast was born in 1914 in Manhattan, New York, one of four children. His father, Barney, was an ironworker, a cable-car conductor, then a garment worker. His mother, Ida, died when he was still a child. Howard Fast graduated from George Washington High School, then attended the National Academy of Design for two years before deciding he wanted to be a writer rather than an artist.

He had sold his first story to Amazing Stories magazine in 1931, when he was only 17. A year later he sold his first novel, a historical romance called Two Valleys, to the Dial Press for a $100 advance. His first noticeable success didn't come for another few years, however, until in 1939 Conceived in Liberty, a novel about Valley Forge, was published. It has since sold over a million copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages. He followed it with a novel about American Indians, The Last Frontier (1941), and The Unvanquished (1942), about George Washington during the bleakest months of the American Revolution.

Fast's breakthrough came in 1943 with Citizen Tom Paine, a novel that many agreed played a big part in restoring the reputation of the radical pamphleteer. Fast worked in the Office of War Information during the early years of the Second World War but in 1943 joined the Communist Party, a decision he made in part, he said, because of the poverty he experienced as a child.

In 1944 he published the best-selling Freedom Road, about a former slave in the post-Civil War South who becomes a United States senator. (Muhammad Ali starred in the 1979 TV mini-series.) By now, Fast's novels had brought him to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. His work was denounced as Communist propaganda – Citizen Tom Paine was banned in high school libraries in New York City.

In 1945, the congressional committee insisted that he identify people who had helped build a hospital in France for anti-Fascist fighters from the Spanish Civil War. He refused and, after years of legal battles, in 1950 was jailed for three months.

His prison experiences inspired Spartacus, in which the slave Spartacus leads a revolt against the Roman empire. The novel was rejected by a number of publishers, many of whom received visits from FBI agents. Fast eventually set up his own publishing outfit, Blue Heron Press, and published the book himself in 1953.

In the same year he was awarded the Stalin International Peace Prize. He was big in Russia – print runs of 500,000 for his novels were not unusual there. The FBI may have had an 1,100-page file on him but abroad he was a hero. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda dedicated verse to him and Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera expressed their admiration.

After Fast left the Communist Party in 1956, he wrote about his political experiences in The Naked God (1957), saying, "I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed." His blacklisting eased once he had resigned from the Party and in 1957 he moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts.

His success as a novelist continued through the Sixties and Seventies. In 1977 he wrote The Immigrants, which was turned into a two-part television film and became the first of a series of books about an American family – the Lavettes – from the turn of the century through to the Vietnam war. He also wrote plays, children's books and poetry. He was a staff writer for the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, in his early years and later a columnist on the local newspaper Greenwich Time. During his blacklisted period he had begun to write detective stories under the name E.V. Cunningham, featuring a nisei detective, Masao Masuto. Fast, like Masuto, was a Zen Buddhist, partly because, he said, "it's a very nice way of looking at the world".

In his 1990 memoir, Being Red, he said: "In the party I found ambition, narrowness and hatred; I also found love and dedication and high courage and integrity – and some of the noblest human beings I have ever known." He commented later: "I'm a lefty. I was born one, and I'll die one."

Fast's last book, Greenwich (2000) was a novel of ideas centred around a dinner party in Greenwich, Connecticut. "The only thing that infuriates me," he once commented, "is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime."

Peter Guttridge