Matt Damon may play a great hero in The Odyssey, but one of the star’s own heroes is also set for his time in the spotlight. In Massachusetts in the 1970s and 80s, Damon grew up close to Howard Zinn, now the subject of The People’s Historian, a biography by Dave Zirin.

“Frankly,” Zirin said, “the fact that he’s Matt Damon and oh by the way is now in the biggest movie perhaps since Titanic, it makes it a nice little bauble for the book that I got to interview him.

“But honestly, I would have interviewed anybody who had Matt Damon’s perspective of being young and knowing Howard Zinn as this kind of elder, because the dynamics of their relationship to me really say something about Zinn, from him being willing to go to little Mattie’s public high school to do a talk, as a favor to the family, to being a friend and a sounding board, not behaving like some unapproachable elder, but at the same time it being pretty clear that other adults really respected this guy.”

Many did, worldwide. After an epic career in academia and progressive politics, Zinn died in 2010, aged 87. Damon has carried lessons from him through his own career. Good Will Hunting, his breakthrough hit from 1997, contains mention of Zinn’s seminal work, A People’s History of the United States: “That book’ll fuckin’ knock you on your ass.” Damon has sought to bring Zinn to the screen, including via the documentary The People Speak, from 2009.

But despite such adult endeavors, Zirin said the star’s “child’s perspective on Howard Zinn” was most useful when it came to writing his book. After all, plenty of American schoolchildren continue to come to know Zinn through A People’s History, first published in 1980, often updated, now with more than 4m copies sold. The story of America from “1492-Present”, it is explicitly not the story of the great white men of tradition, from Christopher Columbus to the founders and on through the civil war, the Gilded Age and the long 20th century. Inevitably, it has long been a target for angry rightwingers.

“Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history,” Donald Trump said at the National Archives in September 2020, laying the ground for the present assault on revisionist history.

When asking historians or biographers what their subject might have made of Trump, it often pays to be circumspect. Not when talking to Zirin, who is sports editor of the Nation, the progressive magazine founded in 1865. In his introduction, Zirin considers what Zinn would have thought about the politics of the 2020s, including the pursuit of racial justice and its rightwing backlash. Furthermore, Zirin knew Zinn well, having written his own A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and having moderated events with Zinn towards the end of his life.

“He wrote so much and he lectured so much to the end of his life, that we have more than breadcrumbs” about what Zinn would think, Zirin said. “We have full loaves of bread. When you read what he was writing about the Bush administration and the endless wars and the growth of the surveillance state, he could very much be talking about Donald Trump, in terms of his acidic humor about having this dullard in the White House, to the growth of tyranny … he had a perspective on history and how one weathered the ups and downs of history, and in those statements you get a kind of broad view that I think is universal and can apply to 2026 as much as to 1949.”

Zinn was born in 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, to poor Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary. At 17, he went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Swiftly, he became a union organizer, beginning a political journey that would land him in the sights of the FBI in the red scare and after. In 1944, he met Roslyn Shechter, another leftwing firebrand who became his wife. Joining the US Army Air Corps to fight fascism, Zinn became a bombardier. In April 1945, he took part in a raid over the French coast, an early use of napalm. His horrified realization of what he helped do to the town of Royan would shape his decades of activism and protest.

Zinn was a leading voice against the Vietnam war, where napalm was heavily used. In an extraordinary chapter, Zirin retells the story of the arduous, hazardous journey Zinn and the priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan took to Hanoi in 1968, to secure the release of three US airmen, battling absurd army bureaucracy and Washington machinations. Another key passage of The People’s Historian concerns the early to mid-60s, years when Howard and Roz Zinn worked on the ground in the American south, in the thick of the civil rights struggle. Academic politics intrudes too, including stories of how Zinn ran afoul of conservative authorities at Spelman College in Atlanta and at Boston University, where he taught for decades. Given such rich subject matter, Zirin’s book sometimes reads less like a biography of a historian than as the basis for a novel or screenplay, written (in fantasyland) by Joseph Heller or Philip Roth.

Zirin found himself thinking cinematically, sometimes “of the Woody Allen character Zelig or or even the Tom Hanks character of Forrest Gump: people who find themselves unintentionally at these incredible pivot points in history. And yet the difference between Howard Zinn and Zelig or Forrest Gump is that Zinn is also a working-class, Ivy League-trained historian [he studied at NYU and Columbia after the war], so he finds himself at these incredible pivots and yet also has this incredible history and perspective and leadership ability through his years as an organizer. It’s incredible. It would be like if John Sayles directed Forrest Gump.”

Zirin clearly looked up to Zinn, much as Damon did before. Nonetheless, the portrait in Zirin’s pages is unsparing.

“There’s a sign over my desk that says ‘hagiography’ with a line through it,” Zirin said. “I looked for the warts, hard, because the fear going in was given my respect for the work and the fact I got to know him at the end of his life,” a need to celebrate the man and his work might take over.

Zinn’s commitment to protest and rise to national fame was hard on Roz and their children, Jeff and Myla. When times got tough for Zinn, Zirin said: “What I found was that if you want to call it his drug of choice, he was able to live through these times when he was also able to lecture in the classroom, about all sorts of topics from the history of civil liberties to the Gilded Age. He taught social sciences at different points, and then saw his students be able to go out and apply it, then come back to the classroom. He lived through times when people were living history. He was able to teach that history, and then see history being made.”

• The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, published by Dutton, is out now.