Unknown, dedicated to Fred Stein Archive · Public domain

Howard Fast wrote Spartacus while serving a three-month sentence for contempt of Congress in 1950, jailed after refusing to give the House Un-American Activities Committee the names of contributors to a fund for orphans of the Spanish Civil War. Unable to find a mainstream publisher afterward, he printed Spartacus himself through his own press, and it became a bestseller before major publishers picked it up. A Communist Party member since 1943 who had won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, Fast broke with the party after learning of Stalin's crimes and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, laying out his disillusionment in The Naked God.