When, in 1954, Ralph Ellison lamented that “too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience,” few would have thought J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's imperious director, would be among those likely readers. William Maxwell's new study reveals in impressive detail that Hoover and his colleagues read scores of works by black writers, and argues that several writers, such as Ellison, were aware of this fact. In the years between Hoover's appointment to the Justice Department's Radical Division in 1919, through to his death in 1972, the Bureau kept tabs on at least fifty-one prominent black writers. Maxwell describes how, through acts of wholesale confiscation, “discrete” subscriptions, and visits to neighbourhood bookstores, the Bureau assembled a systematic collection of black writers' work, “larger than any American peer” (49). Hoover was not only interested in collecting books, though, and, like several of the agents he succeeded and appointed – including Robert Adger Bowen, an occasional editor, and William C. Sullivan, a former Massachusetts English teacher and respected student of literature, the FBI's assistant director in the 1960s – he harboured literary ambitions of his own. Maxwell describes this orientation as “lit.-cop federalism,” an infatuation with text-based activities. This orientation not only shines new light on the Bureau's organizational history, but also throws distorting shadows over African American literary history.

F. B. Eyes puts forward five major contentions: three clustered around the social and organizational history of the FBI and black writers, and two which make claims about the intellectual contours of African American literature. The first set of claims is the less contentious, and establishes more fully than previous scholarship has done the manner and extent of FBI surveillance of black writers. Maxwell reveals the depth of this scrutiny, and provides an interesting, if overwrought, account of the series of “counterliteratures” the Bureau produced. The creation of such files, he argues, was “tightly bound to the agency's successful evolution” as an arbiter of American security. Yet it seems odd that one of the notable spurts in the Bureau's growth (when the number of agents rose from 266 in 1933 to five thousand in 1945) happened during a “period of Bureau detachment from African American letters” (80). What did all of these spies make of black writers' work?

It is among the more dubious claims of F. B. Eyes that we should think of FBI agents as literary critics. Much of the study attempts to draw out the “similarity between [FBI] ghostreaders and academic literary critics” (24). The book puts forth the files agents compiled on black writing as “recognizably literary-critical documents” (129), and advances the view that the FBI ranks as “the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature” (18). These are extravagant claims, and ones that unduly magnify the occasional resemblance between the files FBI agents kept and the texts literary scholars wrote (more plausibly Mary Helen Washington refers to these files as “invaluable biographical sources” in her recent The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (2014)). When agents turned the pages of black writers' fiction they offered only the most perfunctory statements about those works (McKay's Harlem Shadows (1922) was said to be “a collection of radical poems” (64), for example), though this in itself would not disqualify them from being considered literary critics, as readers of Publishers Weekly will know. Still, it was not only that they lacked the talent to pass incisive comments on such works, but also that agents did not have the inclination to do so. The whereabouts and left-wing affiliations of black writers were the main tributaries to the Bureau's scrutiny of this literature. When Richard Wright came to Hoover's attention – inexplicably late in 1942 (80) – agents were instructed to find out about Wright's “background, inclinations, and current activities” (215). No one cared about “How ‘Bigger’ [Thomas] was Born.”

Those who might have worried about Bigger were the ordinary citizens who wrote to Hoover. They did so, Maxwell tells us, because they imagined the Bureau as “an arbiter of Afro-modernism” (165), and not, as seems more likely, because they found Langston Hughes's poems blasphemous, or knew that James Baldwin's latest novel revelled in matters of a “degenerate nature,” and they wanted action to be taken. The action that the Bureau did take was not straightforward suppression, though; in fact, it was quite distinct from “muzzling state censorship” (6). Maxwell finds little evidence of “book-killing, stop-the-presses FBI censorship of Afro-modernist literature” (218), and instead argues that the FBI approached this literature more in the spirit of “exploration than repression” (43). If the study's tone imagines a modern reader surprised to learn of such facts, it attempts to conjure that surprise with its assertion that a good number of these black writers also knew their work was being read. The evidence for this latter claim seems uneven, slanted towards the latter years of the study, to Wright's 1949 poem, but also to a Baldwin manuscript, “The Blood Counters,” and to an occasional John A. Williams novel. This matters because on it rests Maxwell's interpretation that awareness of FBI surveillance acted as a tissue that connected generations of black writers, ghostreading serving as “an ironic vehicle of intergenerational bonding among African American writers” (288). It is an interpretation he offers in qualification of Lawrence Jackson's characterization of these writers as an “Indignant Generation.”Footnote ¹ Those who wish to judge for themselves the merits of this alternative stance, and others, can do so, as Maxwell has generously made most of the files attained through his extensive freedom-of-information requests available online (see http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes). The site provides the “nuts and bolts” (15) of F. B. Eyes, and allows one to glimpse how the exaggerated claims made about these interesting building materials might have skewed this work's basic architecture.