Description:

William Maxwell
English, Washington University St Loius

William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the award-winning book "New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars" and the editor of Claude McKay's "Complete Poems." In January 2015, Princeton University Press will publish his book "F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature." Maxwell has served on the editorial boards of "American Literature" and "African American Review." Currently, he is a contributing editor of "American Literary History" and a member of the executive committee of the MLA division on 20th-century American literature.

talk description: Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover’s white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI’s hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, "F.B. Eyes" exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels.  Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.

reception to follow.