SOURCE: “Rolling Up the Red Carpet,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 9, 1990, pp. 2, 13.

In the following review of Being Red, Braudy commends Fast's insight into political history, though he finds fault in his reticence concerning his personal life and motivations.

Howard Fast published his first novel in 1933 at age 18. He was part of a generation of up-from-poverty writers who came of age in the 1930s, working a multitude of odd jobs while they read their way through the library stacks. It seemed almost inevitable that he would also join the Communist Party.

Fast's first great successes were in historical novels that looked at American values from the vantage point of the rebel, the outsider and the slave. They reflected the revisionary view of what was truly “American” that animated both Popular Front politics and the then-embryonic academic interest in American history and literature. Conceived in Liberty (1939), The...