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   Howard Fast (1914-2003), Author & Self-Publisher.. Today's featured self-publishing success story is that of Wikipedia: Howard Fast. His story is a bit different from many others. Most of our authors were forced to self-publish when the establishment drones controlling the business were incapable of recognizing their talent and genius, and their enormous popular sales and earning potential. Most such authors quickly hit the jackpot, and were then snapped up by the established money machines. Howard Fast wrote his first novel at age 18. An impoverished Jewish kid in New York (his father was a British Jew, his mother a Ukrainian Jew), Howard was forced to sell newspapers on the streets as a youth. His mother died when Howard was five, and his father was unemployed. Brother Julius was farmed out to relatives, and older brother Jerome inducted young Howard into the joys of street urchin news peddling. Howard hitch-hiked and rode the rails around the country as a teenager. He found refuge in voracious reading, and found that he enjoyed writing. At 18, during the depths of the Great Depression in 1933, he sold his first novel (Two Valleys) to a publisher. He was a 'published' author before he was old enough to drink a beer. His interest in History led him to write Citizen Paine and other insightful novels, with which he made a name for himself early in life. His social sympathies and intellectual bent led him away from the standard propaganda extolling laissez-faire capitalism and toward Communism. After working for the U.S. Government during World War II, his growing philosophical beliefs led him into conflict with none other than the infamous Sen. Joe McCarthy, who organized a regime of terror against intellectuals and government officials. McCarthy's reign of terror ended when he died of acute alcoholism that no doubt fueled his paranoia and rage in thinking there was a Communist behind every tree and every desk, from the White House on down. McCarthy did get one thing right: Joseph Stalin, the delusional and murderous Soviet dictator, had infiltrated vast espionage networks into the United States. Many innocent authors, artists, actors, and other intellectuals, guilty only of free thinking, were blacklisted. The atmosphere was especially ripe for protest after the Great Depression had laid bare the ugly underbelly of U.S. industrialism, with striking workers still being shot dead by corporate goons as recently as the 1930s (e.g., in 1934, police in Minneapolis shot 67 striking Teamsters Union members). Corporate violence against working men and women had long been brewing since the Gilded Age of excess, after Northern corporate chiefs defeated their rivals in the plantation South, and became a world-class oligarchy in all but name (e.g., Rockefeller, Carnegia, Vanderbilt, et al). Howard Fast had grown up impoverished and developed strong opinions amid such deep-seated enmity between the industrial bosses and working classes. During the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s, he was blacklisted and no longer able to publish under his own name. His career appeared to be finished at the ripe old age of 33. But Howard had always been resourceful…

   Spartacus. Howard Fast wrote his best-known novel while serving a three-month prison sentence for Contempt of Congress. He had refused to reveal, under McCarthy's public interrogations, the names of people (including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt) who had donated money to a home for orphans of U.S. Spanish Civil War veterans. The real-life Spartacus was a Thracian (modern Bulgaria) gladiator of great fighting prowess and military genius who fought the might of the Late Roman Republic to a stand-still for three years in 73-71 BCE. Spartacus simply wanted to break free with a few fellow gladiators and escape back to his native Thrace. Unfortunately, his fame and the cleverness of the breakout spread quickly. While the Roman authorities initiated a manhunt, tens of thousands of slaves flocked to Spartacus. The latter, unable to make a run for freedom, hoped to fight his way down the Italian Pensinsula and sail to Africa. With his plans thwarted, Spartacus and over 100,000 escaped slaves camped on the high slopes of Mt. Vesuvius. For three years, they defeated one Roman army after another, until Spartacus' organization collapsed under the collective might of all Italy under Roman sway. Spartacus was the leader of one of history's most successful slave revolts, and a symbol of the brave little guy standing up to the big bully 'System.' He was also a perfect symbol of Howard Fast's political ideas, which Fast expressed in some ways with more enthusiasm than clarity in his iconic novel. The book was so popular that it was made into an award winning movie (Spartacus, 1960, directed by Stanley Kubrick and Anthony Mann, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, all-star cast including Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton, and Tony Curtis. The film won four academy awards, including Peter Ustinov as Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and two nominations. Howard Fast assisted on the screenplay, which helped bring him back out of the blacklist cold, ten years after his banishment. Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun) was also blacklisted and jailed for similar reasons in the early 1950s.

   The Immigrants. In his later career, Howard Fast wrote detective novels under two pseudonyms. He wrote a number of television and film scripts as well, including How The West Was Won. He wrote a six-novel series kicking off with 1977's The Immigrants. He died in California in 2003. His best-remembered novel, Spartacus, was self-published and achieved enormous success.