Dangerous Dossiers

by Herbert Mitgang

Recounts the fifty-year espionage campaign waged by U.S. intelligence agencies against such noted American writers as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Sandburg, as well as present-day authors

Genres: History

275 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 14, 1988

About the author

Former president of Authors Guild and the Authors League Fund, worked for authors' rights. Using the Freedom of Information Act, exposed the FBI's following of authors for political reasons, such as supporting civil rights for African-Americans.

Reviews

[Erik Graff]

Mitgang spent years employing his Freedom of Information Act rights to request governmental files--primarily from the FBI--on prominent American figures, most of them literary, most of them deceased. The documents received were usually heavily censored, but he persisted with appeals and supplemented the materials with his own researches from the public domain. The results summarized in this book indicate that virtually every prominent American literary figure since WWI has been investigated by the government, even such unlikely "alleged communist sympathizere" as Ronald Reagan, Rex Stout and Archibald McLeish.

Reading this, I was appalled not only at the covert invasions of privacy practiced by agencies of our government, but also at the tremendous resources wasted in such pursuits and the amazing ignorance of the people ordering and doing the investigations and reports. FBI agents are supposed to be smart, to be persons with advanced degrees in either law or public accounting. This may be so, but whatever schools they went to apparently had little regard for the liberal arts.

[Raoul]

It was good to see that a number of authors that won the Pulitzer Prize were investigated by the FBI during the Hoover years. Although the amount of information provided in this book is limited it is comforting that there will always be independent thinkers and a strong voice for justice in the writing community.

[Marisa]

Really 3.5 stars.

This is Herbert Mitgang's daring expose on the tactics utilized by the Federal Government in order to maintain dossiers on some of America's most revered authors. Mitgang uses this platform to demonstrate the complete lack of necessity for these files, as none of the 50 novelists, poets, playwrights, and artists he writes about were ever arrested, tried, or convicted for their "Un-American" associations. As well, Mitgang emphasizes the extraordinary waste of time and money that went into these dossiers, primarily during such major events as World War II.

Mitgang's research is impressive. Years were spent requesting files from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act; however, many of the files were still heavily censored upon receipt.

The content does become rather redundant at times, but it remains a thought-provoking work.