Word: fasts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...giving the book a scope beyond the story of Dan Lavette, Fast creates something more than another tale of how the American Dream went sour. He imparts a feeling for the rich variety of life that was swirling in America while the Gross National Product expanded. Fast is, above all, a splendid storyteller, a chef whose recipe is a rich blend of human incident and emotion. And he has an ample stock of ingredients...
...writing has been forged and honed sharp by his long writing career and his own Lavette-like rise from poverty. In 1957 Fast wrote of his youth in The Naked...
...hard to connect the author of this passage with the soft-spoken, philosophical man who came to Boston last week. Fast looks on the hardships of his life with a curiously detached perspective, pointing out very reasonably that they were important to his writing. In the Communist Party Fast once found an inspiring movement and struggle, a brave, historic fight for freedom. Even when he entered prison he went as a writer, a man whose purpose was to build up a store of experience. He told his wife at the time that it would be a shame for a writer...
...Fast today sounds philosophical almost to the point of complacency, the story of his own life and the stories of many of his books' heroes have been tales of fighters. Lavette's response to any problem is to charge headlong into it. In Fast's fictionalized biography Citizen Tom Paine (1943), Thomas Paine continues to work for the Revolution after putting out his pamphlet Common Sense, and he dies friendless after he goes on to criticize the new government his efforts have helped to establish. The American (1946) is a fictionalized biography of John P. Altgeld, a poor Illinois farm...
...recent years Fast has freed himself from the reins of historical fiction to produce three collections of short stories that libraries catalogue as "fantasy and science fiction," although Fast calls the most recent, Time and the Riddle, "my Zen stories." In these books he cuts loose and plays with absurdities. One tale relates how an American general in Vietnam, "Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie," accidentally shoots down an angel while blasting Viet Cong with his machine gun. Another tells of a hole that appears in the floor of a fourth-story apartment in Los Ahgeles, and how a sunlit pasture...