E. V. Cunningham was born Howard Melvin Fast in New York City on November 11, 1914, the son of Barney Fast and Ida Miller Fast. Educated at George Washington High School and the National Academy of Design in New York, he later worked at odd jobs and was a page at the New York Public Library while working on his first novel. In 1933, he received the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Award. On June 6, 1937, he married Bette Cohen; they had two children, Rachel and Jonathan. From 1942 to 1943, Cunningham served overseas with the Office of War Information. In 1944, while with an Army film project, he became a war correspondent; in 1945, he became a foreign correspondent for Esquire and Coronet.

Cunningham had a long career as prolific writer, lecturer, and political activist. His early novels, written as Fast, focused primarily on the Revolutionary War, and The Last Frontier (1941) received particular praise as a taut and moving story of the abuse and extermination of three hundred Cheyenne. These provocative works tried to humanize history and historical figures, from George Washington to Thomas Paine, admitting their weaknesses and demonstrating the processes that led them to greatness.

In 1943, Cunningham’s antifascist feeling, which had led him to work in a hospital for wounded Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, led him to the communist cause; during this period, he created one-dimensional, doctrinaire works with capitalist villains and proletarian heroes. He continued to write historical fiction, but more and more with a Marxist slant. In 1947, he was imprisoned for contempt, having refused to give the House Committee on Un-American Activities information about the supporters of the Spanish hospital. While serving his term, he wrote Spartacus (as Fast; 1951), a controversial treatment of the great slave revolt of 71 b.c.e., which won for him numerous prizes.

Cunningham later founded the World Peace Movement, and, between 1950 and 1955, he served as a member of the World Peace Council. In 1952, he campaigned for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket. Unable to find a publisher, in 1952 he founded the Blue Heron Press in New York to publish his own materials. By 1957, however, tired of communist pressures to change his works and disenchanted with the Communist Party, he wrote The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (as Fast), clearly and completely recanting.

Until the 1980’s, Cunningham turned out about one book per year: historical fiction, science fiction, and thrillers. These works vary considerably in quality, but they all try to teach, usually focusing on compassion and humanism rather than doctrine. As a consequence, he received the National Association of Independent Schools Award in 1962. Always an idealist, Cunningham believed that books “open a thousand doors, they shape lives and answer questions, they widen horizons, they offer hope for the heart and food for the soul”; thus, a writer has an obligation to portray the truth. He died in New York in 2003.