F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

Maxwell (English, African American studies, Washington Univ. in St. Louis; New Negro, Old Left) explores the unlikely relationship between J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and African American literature over a half-century period in the mid-20th century. Starting with the early days of the Harlem Renaissance, the bureau employed "ghostreaders" to monitor the ideas and themes that populated the work of leading African American voices. Maxwell's central thesis is that during World War II and the Red Scare of the 1950s, the organization used national security concerns as leverage to threaten subversive black writers with imprisonment, and that the lingering specter of such consequences led to preemptive self-censoring. This volume is strongest when covering the historical aspects of FBI eavesdropping and less so when it gets bogged down into literary theory and more speculative aspects of Hoover's life.