Editing Howard Fast (section)

===Early life===
Fast was born in [[New York City]]. His mother, Ida (née Miller), was a British Jewish immigrant, and his father, Barney Fast, was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who shortened his name from Fastovsky upon arrival in America. When his mother died in 1923 and his father became unemployed, Howard's youngest brother, [[Julius Fast|Julius]], went to live with relatives, while he and his older brother, Jerome, sold newspapers. Howard credited his early voracious reading to a part-time job in the [[New York Public Library]].

Fast began writing at an early age. While hitchhiking and riding railroads around the country to find odd jobs, he wrote his first novel, ''Two Valleys'', published in 1933 when he was 18. His first popular work was ''Citizen Tom Paine'', a fictional account of the life of [[Thomas Paine]]. Always interested in American history, Fast also wrote ''The Last Frontier'' (about the [[Cheyenne]] Indians' attempt to return to their native land, and which inspired the 1964 movie ''[[Cheyenne Autumn]]'')<ref>Fast, ''Being Red'' (1990) pp. 162–63.</ref> and ''Freedom Road'' (about the lives of former [[slavery|slaves]] during [[Reconstruction era of the United States|Reconstruction]]).

The novel ''Freedom Road'' is based on a true story and was made into a [[Freedom Road|miniseries of the same name]] starring [[Muhammad Ali]], who, in a rare acting role, played Gideon Jackson, an ex-slave in 1870s [[South Carolina]] who is elected to the [[United States House|U.S. House]] and battles the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations to keep the land that they had tended all their lives.