F.B. EYES

Maxwell (English and African-American Studies, Washington Univ.; New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars, 1999) reveals the obsession of the late FBI director with the lives and literature of leading black writers.

The author takes a hard look at the FBI’s reading and interpretations of African-American writing and at the personal lives of some of the greatest writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Having received myriad documents via the Freedom of Information Act (the author appends a list of more than 100), Maxwell painstakingly reconstructs the era and reimagines the principal players in this largely hidden drama—although he demonstrates later that many of the writers under surveillance were very well aware of it. Some of the author’s discoveries are startling. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry had the thickest file (over 1,000 pages); Claude McKay was the first black author the FBI focused on; Random House editor Bennett Cerf cooperated eagerly; J. Edgar Hoover believed James Baldwin was a “pervert”; Langston Hughes’ file exceeded 500 pages; Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer seemed to have had no files at all. Perhaps the most surprising discovery, though, is how thoroughly the FBI “ghostreaders” read these writers’ texts, applying critical principles worthy of graduate students. Maxwell pauses in these sections to dive into the whirlpools of literary theory, journeys that numerous general readers would probably rather eschew. The author notes how the FBI backed off somewhat during the Depression and then returned to their focus during and after World War II. Maxwell also takes us to the current era and the works of Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. This is a dense, academic text with a very conventional organization and with paragraphs thick with information and—sometimes—jargon.

An occasionally intriguing work whose organization and diction consign it to reference status.