But McKay was the first, though hardly the last, of one Hoover-tracked subculture that has received less attention: black writers, including some of the most celebrated names in American letters. Edgar Hoover-era surveillance of so-called dissidents-a motley assembly of Soviet sympathizers, anti-war activists and civil rights leaders-has been well documented since the 1970s. authorities would not let him back into the country “without special intervention.” The poet would live abroad until 1934, spending most of his Harlem Renaissance wary of returning to Harlem. The ports of New York and Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland, New Orleans and Baltimore, were all put on notice, with FBI agents in Maryland boasting of a local police department on the “lookout” for one “Claude McKay (colored).” For more than a decade, McKay, well aware he was afflicted by government spies, reasoned that U.S. Immigration and customs officials were ordered to confine man, baggage and documents for “appropriate attention” should McKay attempt to reenter the United States. In the summer of 1922, a “strictly confidential source” dropped word that the Jamaican-born poet and “well-known radical of New York City” planned a trip to the Soviet Union, the home of the Russian Revolution, which the left-wing McKay suspected might be “the greatest event in the history of humanity.” Following McKay’s embarking on the trip that fall, the FBI’s surveillance system plunged into overdrive: cross-examining ship schedules, scouring McKay’s passport records and pressing a distant acquaintance for clues in her Harlem apartment. When other readers were appreciating “If We Must Die” and the rest of the poet’s fierce but well-mannered Shakespearian sonnets, Bureau bookworms-agents tasked with screening texts like McKay’s-were warning of a “collection of radical poems” composed by “a notorious negro revolutionary.” In the mind of the young FBI, however, McKay’s 1922 was most notable as a year of revolutionary danger. Eliot revealed in The Waste Land that April, despite appearances, is the “cruelest month” and Claude McKay announced the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance with the movement’s first book of poetry, Harlem Shadows. James Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel that changed everything but the Ireland it dissected, was published in Paris T.S. Eyes Digital Archive ,” presents high-quality copies of 49 of the FBI files discussed in the book.Īs the textbooks tell it, 1922 was the annus mirabilis-the “wonderful year” of modernist literature in English. ![]() Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, from which this article is adapted. Maxwell, professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St.
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