Dangerous Dossiers
Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors
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- € 3,99
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- € 3,99
Publisher Description
Dangerous Dossiers is as powerful and relevant today as it was when it first made worldwide headlines 25 years ago: a chilling reminder of the dangers of unfettered government intrusion into the lives and beliefs of private citizens, whether famous or not.
This shocking account by award-winning author and former New York Times cultural reporter Herbert Mitgang provided hard evidence for the first time of the decades-long cultural war waged by the FBI and other federal intelligence-gathering agencies against scores of the world’s most renowned writers and artists. Using the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose actual surveillance files kept by the FBI, Mitgang documented that the targets of government snooping included a who’s-who of the literary and artistic worlds whom J. Edgar Hoover and his red-baiting legions suspected of communist leanings or outright disloyalty, usually with no basis whatsoever. They included: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Carl Sandburg, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, and Allen Ginsburg; and artists including Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keefe, and Henry Moore.
Called “a fascinating, illuminating and above all, morally decent book” by The New York Times, and “first-class journalism” by The Associated Press, this exposé and the many “dangerous dossiers” it contains reveal no evidence of guilt on the part of the targets of the FBI witch-hunts. But Mitgang finds plenty of proof of the paranoia, political bias, and cultural illiteracy of those who controlled the nation’s most powerful investigative agencies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The FBI, CIA and other government agencies have not only spied on civil rights, peace and leftist-liberal political groups; for decades, as this report documents, the government has been compiling extensive secret files on eminent writers, dramatists, artists and journalists. Mitgang, cultural correspondent for the New York Times, obtained thousands of pages of declassified material under the Freedom of Information Act. Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Sandburg, Dreiser, Pearl Buck, Dorothy Parker, Thomas Wolfe, Georgia O'Keeffe, Tennessee Williams, Dashiel Hammettthese, and dozens more people, had dossiers maintained on them by an over-zealous FBI. Federal agents penetrated and spied on the Authors Guild and the Dramatists Guild. Living writers kept under surveillance include John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg. Initially excerpted in the New Yorker, Mitgang's damning indictment of government interference with freedom of expression is a blockbuster, an important, brave, chilling expose. 20,000 first printing; BOMC alternate; author tour.