Howard Fast, livre ebook

Winner, 2012 National Jewish Book AwardsSilver Medal, 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards

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Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast's attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in 20th-century America.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Paradise Postponed
Publish or Perish
Politics Delayed
2 The War Against Fascism
The Fatal Embrace
The Reds and the Blacks
3 The Life of the Party
Innocent Abroad
The Road Not Taken
The Politics of Literature
4 Cold War, Hot Seat
The Discouraged American
Down and Out in the USA
5 Banned, Barred, and Beseiged
It Can't Happen Here
War and Peace
6 The Myopia of American Communism
Foley Square Follies
Waltzing at the Waldorf
April in Paris
The Poison of Peekskill
7 Literature and Reality
Howard Fast: Prisoner
Great Expectations
8 Free! But Not at Last
9 Trials and Tribulations
Despair, Distraction, and Defeat
The Push and Pull of Politics
Confrontations Left and Right
10 McCarthyism, Stalinism, and the World according to Fast
11 Culture and the Cold War
To Flee or not to Flee
An Even Brighter Star in the USSR
Signs of Thaw in the Cold War?
12 Things Fall Apart; the Left Doesn't Hold
13 Fast Forward
14 Life in the Fast Lane
California to the New York Island
Looking Backward, Seeing Red
15 Fast and Loose
Disappointment and Despair
Fast in Pursuit
16 Fall and Decline
Notes
Index