Howard Fast, onetime Communist and best-selling author of Spartacus and The Immigrants, has never shied away from difficult subjects, or circumstances. Several years after witnessing the lynching of a 13-year-old black boy, Fast — still a teenager himself — wrote about it for Story magazine. In 1950, he stubbornly refused to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, an act that landed him in jail for three months and got him blacklisted; it also won him almost as much fame as his more than 80 plays and books. Still, writing his latest novel, The Bridge Builder's Story (M.E. Sharpe, $19.95), was perhaps the most difficult undertaking of his long career.
''This is something that sprang out of my own agony,'' says the 81-year-old author, holding back emotion on the phone from his Connecticut home. Fast wrote most of Bridge while his wife of 57 years, Bette, was dying of cancer, finishing it soon after her death a year ago.
In Bridge, a golden American couple fall into the clutches of the Gestapo while visiting Berlin on their honeymoon in 1939. The wife is tortured to death, but the husband is able to survive. Says Fast: ''It's a story about WWII, the horror of the Holocaust. Mainly, though, it's a story about a man who is unable to work out a way to survive the death of a woman he loved.''
Fast, through hard work and the support of his wife's closest friend, has found a way. ''I think I've pulled myself out of it,'' he says. ''Today, I live from day to day because life is a wonderful thing. And what's the alternative?''
Politically, Fast remains optimistic as well. ''I've always been filled with hope. Throughout history, the human side always prevails, though always at a great cost.''
Add your comment
The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail us. An asterisk * indicates a required field.