Howard Melvin Fast (November 11, 1914 – March 12, 2003) was an American novelist and television writer.
 Fast also wrote under the pen names E. V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson.
Robert Walser is an American musicologist associated with the "new musicology".
 He is author of the book "Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music", concerning heavy metal music.
 Walser currently is a member of the faculty and director of the Center for Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University.
Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, released in 1996, was the first feature-length film by the Brothers Quay, produced by Keith Griffiths and Janine Marmot.
 It is based on "Jakob von Gunten", a novel written by Robert Walser.
 It stars Mark Rylance, Alice Krige, and Gottfried John.
Carl Seelig (born May 11, 1894, Zurich; died February 15, 1962, Zurich) was a German-Swiss writer and patron.
 He was best known as a friend, promoter and guardian of Robert Walser and the first biographer of Albert Einstein.
Susan Bernofsky is an American translator of German-language literature.
 She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world.
 She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck.
 Her prizes translation include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Schlegel-Tieck Prize.
 She was also selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
Jürg Amann (born in Winterthur on July 2, 1947; died on May 5, 2013 in Zurich) was a Swiss author and dramatist.
 He has written radio plays, a biography of Robert Walser, and other works.
Robert Walser (15 April 1878 – 25 December 1956) was a German-speaking Swiss writer.
Damion Searls is an American writer and translator.
 He grew up in New York and studied at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.
 He specializes in translating literary works from Western European languages such as German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch.
 Among the authors he has translated are Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, and Nescio.
 He has received numerous grants and fellowships for his translations.
Burkhard Stangl (born 6 November 1960 in Eggenburg, Lower Austria) is a composer and musician, currently residing in Vienna, Austria.
 Playing primarily guitar and electronics, he is a prolific performer in the world of electro-acoustic improvisation, having participated in over 50 recordings.
 One of his most noted recordings is "schnee", a duet with Cristof Kurzmann, inspired by four films and a quote from writer Robert Walser.
 It has been recorded live, as "schnee_live", and has spawned a similarly themed "meta-song suite," "neuschnee".
 His 1997 opera "Der Venusmond" was recorded partially on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Schneewittchen (Snow White) is an opera by Heinz Holliger.
 He wrote the libretto based on a poetic text by Robert Walser in iambic trimeter.
 The opera received its première on 17 October 1998 at the Zurich Opera House which had commissioned the work.
 The work is a psychoanalytical reworking of the fairy tale, analysing the complex relationships between the roles.
 It is not a .

Question: What occupation was shared by Howard Fast and Robert Walser?
Answer: writer