Howard Melvin Fast was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under the pen names E.V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson.

Cheyenne Autumn is a 1964 American epic Western film starring Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, James Stewart, and Edward G. Robinson. It tells the story of a factual event, the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878–79, told in "Hollywood style" using a great deal of artistic license. The film was the last western directed by John Ford, who proclaimed it an elegy for the Native Americans who had been abused by the U.S. government and misrepresented by many of the director's own films. With a budget of more than $4 million, the film was relatively unsuccessful at the box office and failed to earn a profit for its distributor Warner Bros.