It was the literary critic and socialist Irving Howe, one of the main characters in John Rodden's new book, who invented the term “New York intellectuals.” Writing in 1969, Howe described a group of writers who, with a couple of exceptions, shared his own working-class, immigrant, Jewish background. Assembling in the 1930s, the New York intellectuals either joined or traveled alongside the American communist movement, before developing an intense and abiding hatred of Stalinism. As they quit the orbit of “the Party,” the intellectuals experimented with various forms of leftist anti-Stalinism – chiefly Trotskyism – and explored their growing interest in modernist literature. In the years after World War II, these twin intellectual enthusiasms (the interest in Marxism now mainly just theoretical) earned the New York intellectuals unexpected cultural authority in the form of prestigious and influential editorial and academic positions. When Howe was writing in the late 1960s, it had just emerged that the intellectuals had even received indirect and occasional secret subsidies from the CIA. The agency wanted to showcase their peculiar brand of highbrow, informed anti-Stalinism to foreign audiences in the Cold War, as proof of the sophistication of US intellectual life.

However, not all branches of US intelligence felt so positive about the New York intellectuals. As Rodden shows, the domestic security service, the FBI, and its long-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, regarded them, with their immigrant origins and complex radical pasts, with considerable suspicion. Focussing on three figures in particular – Howe, the eminent literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the iconoclastic journalist Dwight Macdonald – Rodden documents in detail how the bureau surveilled the intellectuals during the early Cold War era, monitoring their movements, interviewing acquaintances, and sometimes even tailing them and opening their mail. Along the way, he reveals surprising details about FBI investigations during this period, including agents’ woefully poor understanding of factional leftist politics and their failure to read any of the published writings of the intellectuals concerned. He also makes enterprising use of the (often heavily redacted) FBI files about his three intellectuals as biographical sources, shedding new light on their personal lives and intellectual concerns. Particularly interesting are the passages about Macdonald's disruptive attendance at the ill-conceived 1965 Festival of the Arts at the Lyndon Johnson White House. Rodden portrays this as a crucial moment in the Vietnam War-era breakdown of the post-World War II rapprochment between US intellectuals and their government.

There is much to admire and enjoy in this volume. Rodden has written extensively about the New York intellectuals before and is a reliable guide to their sectarian political history. Despite the redactions and errors that litter them, the FBI files he cites contain several fascinating vignettes, such as Irving Howe's calm and cordial response when two FBI agents descended on him in the street and interviewed him in his car. Rodden is clearly influenced by the public intellectuals whom he studies, and he writes in a lively, even exuberant, style, uncluttered by jargon. He is also more than ready to pursue the ethical questions raised by the New York intellectuals’ experience of intrusive state surveillance into the twenty-first century, when the need to strike a balance between national security and individual liberty has again become an urgent political challenge.

There are limits to Rodden's approach, however. It isn't entirely clear on what basis he selected his three individuals as representative of the larger New York intellectual community. At 152 pages, the book is brief, and it's possible to imagine a longer, more comprehensive, study with a bigger cast, perhaps organized thematically rather than around individuals. Despite receiving equal billing in the title with the intellectuals or “eggheads,” the “G-Men” of the FBI are present only as sinisterly anonymous figures or bumbling Keystone Cops. One wishes Rodden had made greater use of the growing scholarly literature about the bureau to present a more complete picture. For example, he discusses the CIA's role as a clandestine cultural patron but has tantalizingly little to say about the dramatic contrast between the attitudes toward the New York intellectuals of the foreign and domestic US security services (by the way, the literature about the CIA and the “cultural Cold War” has moved on considerably since the publication of Frances Stonor Saunders's work, the only secondary source about the subject cited here). Finally, there are moments when the influence of the public-intellectual model becomes excessive and Rodden lapses into purple prose or (rather curmudgeonly) editorializing, for example in an overwrought passage about the “slovenliness” of contemporary culture (66).

Overall, though, this is a worthwhile and timely book, one that reminds us of the continuing relevance of the New York intellectuals and their times to the political and cultural problems of the present day.