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Cunningham, EV

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years ago

Pseudonym of Howard Melvin Fast (1914-2003). He was born in New York City. Fast married Bette Cohen in 1937. In 1943, he joined the American Communist Party. In 1950 Fast was ordered to appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Fast refused to name fellow members of the American Communist Party, claiming that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave him the right to do this. Despite this he was sentenced to three months in prison. Fast was blacklisted but after forming his own publishing company, the Blue Heron Press, he continued write and publish books that reflected his left-wing views.

This included Spartacus (1951), an account of the 71 B.C. slave revolt, Silas Timberman (1954), a novel about a victim of McCarthyism and The Story of Lola Gregg (1956), describing the FBI pursuit and capture of a communist trade unionist. Fast also worked as a staff writer for the Daily Worker. Fast remained loyal to the Communist Party until 1956. The two main reasons for this were the speech made by Nikita Khrushchev exposing the crimes of Joseph Stalin and the decision by the Soviet government to put down the Hungarian Uprising. Fast, like three-quarters of the membership now left the party. The following year he published The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (1957). The Hollywood Blacklist was ended in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for Fast's novel, Spartacus.

Fast himself moved to Hollywood where he wrote several screenplays. However, he continued to write political novels up till 1990. Howard Fast died in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on 12th March, 2003.

His series characters are John Gomaday and Larry Cohen, Police Commissioner and Assistant District Attorney in New York; Harvey Krim, detective for the NYPD, and Masao Masuto, private investigator.

He wrote Fallen Angel (1952) under the pseudonym Walter Ericson.

Cunningham's {early} gimmick of building each novel around an "ordinary" woman violated both the private-eye tradition of male domination and the lesser genre of girl-detective. His women ... are pluckier, cleverer and more honest than the men they meet... they foreshadowed the women's liberation novels of the 1960s. -- Frank Campenni