"J. Edgar Hoover could hardly tell a Joyce from a James or an ism from a wasm, and his most regular reading was the Racing Form. Yet Claire Culleton's important and engrossing book leaves no doubt that Hoover and his Loyalty Watchers went to extreme lengths to influence what Americans did - and didn't - read. Buy this book now, before today's little Hoovers ban it." - Fred Jerome, author of The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist
"Leading us through her own struggles with the censored FBI files J. Edgar Hoover maintained on many of the leading novelists, poets, and publishers of the period, Claire Culleton uncovers a startling history of official anxiety, unofficial surveillance, and covert repression. Reading provocatively between the lines of blacked-out text in Hoover's files, this book pieces together the compelling portrait of a modernism that might have been: one less pointedly snobbish, more politically engaged, and more directly accessible than the disengaged, highbrow movement we have inherited." - Sean Latham, Assistant Professor of English, University of Tulsa, and Editor, James Joyce Quarterly
"For decades, the ruthless and paranoid J. Edgar Hoover used his position as Director of the FBI to defame, intimidate, and undermine writers who challenged the status quo. In Joyce and the G-Men Claire Culleton explores the tactics Hoover and others used to wage war on freedom of expression in the United States and assesses the chilling effect of Hoover's campaign on modern literature. This is an important contribution to literary history and a timely reminder that the abuse of power thrives on secrecy." - Patrick A. McCarthy, Professor of English, University of Miami
"This artful and indignant book shows J. Edgar Hoover's astonishing efforts to micromanage intellectual life in the United States, and will be invaluable in helping us to understand the nightmare of organized political intolerance in our society." - Staughton Lynd, historian and lawyer. His most recent book is Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising.
In the early 1990s, Culleton (English, Kent State Univ.) requested James Joyce's FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). She received 20 mostly blacked-out, cross-referenced pages culled from the files of others, many internally coded by the FBI as Communists. Intrigued, Culleton went on to make countless FOIA requests for documents related to Joyce's friends and family, his editors and publishers, and other modernist writers. Over a decade of working with documents related to Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, and John Steinbeck, Culleton noted that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI showed a pattern of fearing (and seeking to intimidate) figures of a literary movement increasingly critical of mass culture and middle-class values. Despite its catchy title, this is not a work about Joyce but rather a fascinating and horrifying look at how Hoover and his agency sought systematically to "contain and thereby structure expressions of literary modernists." Throughout, Culleton muses about what Modernism could have been without Hoover's endless bullying and political shenanigans. Though this absorbing study raises more questions than it answers, it is essential for most academic libraries. William D. Walsh, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
