Word: fasted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Howard Fast's novel The Immigrants is yet another pop epic to underscore this fact. The life and writing career of the author follow a familiar script as well. Fast, 62, was once the U.S.'s best-known literary Communist. In the '40s he wrote throbbingly about American history: the Revolutionary War in The Unvanquished and Citizen Tom Paine, Reconstruction in Freedom Road. As a political activist of the far left, he spent three months in jail during 1950 for failing to comply with a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena. He was a columnist...
...year of Sputnik, Fast declared his disenchantment with Soviet Communism in a book called The Naked God. It ensured his distinction as American letters' slowest study in Stalinism. Like the immigrants of his new novel, the author looked to California, where some of his earlier novels, including Spartacus, had been turned into film scenarios. He wrote science fiction and mysteries under the name E.V. Cunningham, eventually acquired a house in Beverly Hills, a Porsche and a yen for Zen Buddhism...
Unfortunately, Fast's life contains more dramatic and moral conflict than his new novel, The Immigrants. It is the first book in a projected trilogy that will follow a number of families from 1888 into the present. Universal already plans to film the saga as a 36-part TV series, for which Fast should gross $975,000. The paperback rights have been sold...
...Immigrants could easily be read, and eventually seen, under the title Uphill, Downhill. The principal setting is San Francisco, where Daniel Lavette battles his way from crab fisherman to business tycoon. "He had come out of nothing and he had made himself a king, a veritable emperor," writes Fast with stagy solemnity. "He ruled a fleet of great passenger liners, an airline, a majestic department store, a splendid resort hotel, property, land, and he dispensed the food of life to hundreds of men and women who labored at his will...
...Fast, too, leaves no base uncovered as he once again demonstrates his knack for soap history. The old Marxist reveals a genuine enthusiasm for the rugged values of laissez-faire enterprise in his energetic descriptions of Lavette's schemes and deals. Lest one think that this hero escaped from an Ayn Rand novel, appropriate lip service is paid to such issues as war profiteering and the passive wisdom of ancient Chinese philosophy...