Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Fast, Howard - Rhoda Koenig (review date 5 November 1990)

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Rhoda Koenig (review date 5 November 1990)

SOURCE: “Party Time,” in New York, November 5, 1990, pp. 124-5.

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

Novelist, playwright, biographer, detective-story writer—Howard Fast has been all these, but we know the author of more than 70 books best as a former Communist.

As the title of his autobiography indicates, he knows we do, too Being Red stops in 1957, several years after Fast ended a prison sentence for refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and a few months after he left the party, when Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin. The story he has to tells is a lively and gripping one, and better written than Fast's preachy excursions into other people's histories, though there are lapses: “A writer is a strange creature. He is a delicate sheet of foil on which the world...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. George Mayberry (review date 10 May 1943)
   2. Irving Howe (review date 16 December 1957)
   3. Kenneth Fearing (review date 23 April 1961)
   4. R. Z. Sheppard (review date 7 November 1977)
   5. Merle Rubin (review date 30 September 1984)
   6. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 9 February 1987)
   7. Diana McLellan (review date 17 February 1987)
   8. David Savage (review date 22 February 1987)
   9. Jacqueline Trescott (essay date 3 March 1987)
   10. Howard Fast with Mervyn Rothstein (interview date 10 March 1987)
   11. Michael Kilian (review date 21 April 1987)
   12. Bruce Cook (review date 23 October 1988)
   13. Rhoda Koenig (review date 5 November 1990)
   14. Christopher Hitchens (review date 25 November 1990)
   15. Leo Braudy (review date 9 December 1990)
   16. Stefan Kanfer (review date 10-24 December 1990)
   17. Clancy Sigal (review date 20 January 1991)
   18. Ronald Radosh (review date March 1991)
   19. Gerald Meyer (review date Spring 1993)
   20. Howard Fast with Alan Wald and Alan Filreis (interview date 1995)
   21. George Traister (essay date 1995)
   22. Andrew Macdonald (essay date 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright