James Baldwin : the FBI file / edited and with an introduction and notes by William J. Maxwell.

Decades before Black Lives Matter returned James Baldwin to prominence, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered the Harlem-born author the most powerful broker between black art and black power. Baldwin's 1,884-page FBI file, covering the period from 1958 to 1974, was the largest compiled on any African American artist of the Civil Rights era. This collection of once-secret documents, never before published in book form, captures the FBI's anxious tracking of Baldwin's writings, phone conversations, and sexual habits -- and Baldwin's defiant efforts to spy back at Hoover and his G-men. William J. Maxwell reproduces over one hundred original FBI records, accompanied by a substantial introduction and running commentaries that orient the reader and offer historical context, making this book a revealing look at a crucial slice of the American past.