2020 Reprint of the 1957 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century. He was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. The son of immigrants, Fast grew up in New York City and published his first novel upon finishing high school in 1933. In 1950, his refusal to provide the United States Congress with a list of possible Communist associates earned him a three-month prison sentence. During his incarceration, Fast wrote one of his best-known novels, Spartacus (1951). Throughout his long career, Fast matched his commitment to championing social justice in his writing with a deft, lively storytelling style. In The Naked God the well-known author tells of his disillusionment with Communism and his subsequent break with the Party. The book is Howard Fast's public repudiation of the Communist Party, of which he was a devoted member for thirteen years until reading about the full scope of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. As the bestselling author of Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine, Howard Fast lent his writing talents and celebrity to the communist cause as a steadfast advocate and public figure. However, he felt increasingly ill at ease with the superior manner Party leaders took with rank-and-file members and with rumors of Soviet anti-Semitism. In The Naked God, his first book after officially leaving the Party in 1956, Howard Fast explores the reasons he joined and his long inner struggle with a political movement in which he never felt he truly belonged.

Transformation in the Writing, A Case of Surrender-and-Catch further develops the concepts first presented in Surrender and Catch (1976) and applied to sociology and its history in Survival and Sociology (1991) and autobiography in O Loma! (1989). This idea involves the recognition of the unprecedented nature of the present time in the history of humankind and the planet, a time when we ourselves, rather than Nature or the Deity, can annihilate both ourselves and our planet. Surrender' is nonlinguistic (or prelinguistic), prepredicative', prephenomenal', and involves suspending or bracketing' the world, calling it into question. This is the best any individual can do, in view of the point of crisis at which we are now. In Transformation in the Writing Wolff explores how his hypothesis of Surrender(-and-Catch) bears on aspects of autobiography (emigre status, field work), sociology of knowledge, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and on attitudes to our time.