Biography
Howard Fast, the best-selling novelist (author of “Citizen Tom Paine” and “Freedom Road”) and a member of the JAFRC board was one of the officers and executive-board members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) — the New York relief organization that aided refugees of the Spanish Civil War and survivors of Nazi concentration camps — who were jailed for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee. Subpoenaed in 1946, the board refused to hand over the committee’s records and lists of donors, and in June 1947 a federal jury convicted all of them of contempt of Congress. Their appeal, Barsky v. United States, was rejected, and after the Supreme Court declined to intervene they surrendered in 1950 to serve their sentences. Denied a mainstream publisher after his imprisonment and blacklisting, he wrote his novel “Spartacus” while behind bars and in its aftermath and published it himself — the book Stanley Kubrick and Dalton Trumbo would later film in the movie that helped break the blacklist.
