[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 prints its impressions. …” Like the imprisoned Oscar Wilde remarking that the writer who should have been locked up was Marie Corelli, a character in a Mordecai Richler novel set in the fifties says that Howard Fast should stay in jail for “violence to the English language.”

Left-wing activism was part of the Fast family tradition. In 1898, his father, a Ukrainian immigrant, “and a few other Jewish boys working at the tin factory organized regiment to fight in Cuba and thereby revenge themselves for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.” Unfortunately, there was also a tradition of dissension in the ranks: The worker who collected money for uniforms, sabers, and horses ran off with it. Barney Fast, “a man who always had both feet planted firmly in midair,” married and fathered five children (Howard was born in 1914), a poor but close-knit family that was shattered when Fast's mother died and his father sank into depression.

Eight years old at the time, he went to work soon after, delivering newspapers and hiring himself out to a cigar-maker. (Later, his jobs, such as reclaiming overdue library books from whorehouses, became more interesting.) Worse, his father, in a shortsighted attempt to help the family, moved them from the Lower East Side to the Upper West, where they were the only Jews. After being attacked again and again, Fast “put the largest kitchen knife we had in my belt, walked down the stairs and into the street, and as four kids advanced on me, I presented the butcher knife and stated that I might get only one of them, but that one would be dead.” He was eleven. When not working or fighting, Fast read his way through the public library and started to write. At seventeen, he sold a short story. At eighteen, he sold a novel, his sixth. Shortly before that, thumbing his way through the South, he saw police set on other vagrants with clubs and haul them off, and only his plea to phone his father for bus fare home, he believes, saved him from a chain gang.

The brutality of Fast's background, he says, and his awareness of the misery caused by the Depression, made him a socialist. “And because I came to believe that the only serious socialist party in America was the Communist Party, I was bitterly attacked and slandered for fifteen years of my life.” The ironies alone of Fast's persecution would be enough to make him bitter. Not only was he the author of such advertisements for America as Citizen Tom Paine and Freedom Road (the story of a slave who becomes a congressman), he also wrote the government's daily shortwave broadcast to occupied Europe on the progress of World War II. Also during the war, Fast organized a Communist-sponsored reception for Harry Truman (who, Fast says, knew who his backers were) and was invited to the White House as a reward for his contributions to the 1944 Democratic campaign. The lunch was somewhat less glamorous than Nancy Reagan's affairs: Eleanor Roosevelt explained that while combat GIs were eating cold C rations, she didn't think it right to serve a meal costing more than 30 cents.

The money and influence Fast's career brought him, however, were no use against the anti-Communist mania of the postwar period. He brings alive the days of parochial-school children carrying signs that read KILL A COMMIE FOR CHRIST, of the moronic and vicious editorials that justify his lurid metaphor “dogs sniffing a trail of blood,” and of the Peekskill concerts of 1949, where local rednecks, assisted by local police, burned peace pamphlets and beat and stoned the “white niggers” who had come to hear Paul Robeson. The persecution did not stop with Fast's conviction and imprisonment; magazines and book publishers rejected his work, some of them simply afraid, some directly threatened by the FBI, which also sent an agent to the New York Public Library with an order to destroy his books.

Against this, of course, one must set the fact that even if Communism was no threat to America, it was evil. Fast's defense concerning his ignorance of the party's crimes is that he heard so much anti-Communist nonsense it was hard to believe that some of the accusations were true. But the censorship and interference he suffered from the party higher-ups, too, was a comic distortion of the grimmer restrictions of freedom in the Soviet Union. (Of course, much about the American Communist Party was strange: One wonders what Lenin would have made of The Daily Worker's Broadway-gossip column.) When a play of his was put on by the Communist-backed New Playwrights group, he was told that the part of one son in a Jewish family would be played by James Earl Jones and was reprimanded for his “white chauvinism” when he protested.

Explaining his disenchantment with the party, Fast says, “When you find that a priest can be a selfish bastard and a rabbi a lecher and a judge a cold-blooded murderer … and in your Communist Party, the same lechers and mindless jerks and egotistical power-hungry bastards, then something washes out of you and you are cold and empty inside.” To put it another way, you are grown-up and free of illusions about a perfect substitute family. But that is by the way. Oscar Wilde also thought that it was not as bad to be immoral as to be mediocre, but about that he was wrong. What the strongest nation on Earth did to its woolly thinkers was a lasting shame and a permanent warning. It is good to have this sordid and salutary tale told again.