The official and respectable inspiration behind my new book, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, involves a single FBI file and a tragic historical turning point.

In the late 1990s, I tapped the provisions of the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request the file of Claude McKay, the Jamaican-born pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance and the earliest black writer to make his way onto the FBI's radar. I was then preparing an edition of McKay's complete poems-among other pristine, angry lyrics, he wrote the militant Shakespearian sonnet "If We Must Die" (1919), legendarily recited by Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain.

I had seen evidence of McKay's file in the work of Tyrone Tillery, an earlier McKay biographer, yet I was shocked by what arrived in the mail from FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C.: a 193-page dossier revealing that the Bureau had closely read and aggressively hunted McKay all across the Atlantic world and into Soviet Moscow, where he had dined with Mayakovsky (and "danced a jazz" with Mayakovsky's wife) after addressing a meeting of the COMINTERN.

In the opinion of the FBI’s spy-critics, this groundbreaking black poet, an inspiration to Afro-modernisms from Kingston to Paris, was also a “notorious negro revolutionary” worthy of a global dragnet.

In the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act and the return of unignorable state surveillance to everyday life in the US, I was then provoked to research how many significant African American authors in addition to McKay had been shadowed by Hoover’s FBI. I suspected there would be more than a handful.

Other scholars had discovered files on figures as prominent Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, and I knew that Hoover had entered the Bureau especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, radical politics, and literary publicity.

But I was still surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and “filed” nearly half of the nationally known African American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the Black Arts movement). Taken together, the 51 files I unearthed showed that Hoover’s hardline police and intelligence service also qualified as an informed consumer of African American prose, poetry, and theatre.

Poring over novels, stories, essays, poems, and plays as well as political commentary and intercepted correspondence, the FBI acted as a kind of half-buried readers’ bureau with aboveground effects on the making of black art.

The “G” in the Bureau’s iconic “G-Man,” this is to say, should have stood not just for “government,” but also for what I call “ghostreading,” a duplicitous interpretive enterprise that, like ghostwriting, might be grasped through its effects if not always caught in the act. Unlike nearly every other institution of US literary study, prone to showing interest only during well-promoted black renaissances, America’s ghostreading national constabulary rarely took its eyes off the latest in 20th century African American writing.

And during a 50-year period, the whole of its Hoover era, the Bureau never dismissed this writing as an impractical vogue relevant only to blacks (or, for that matter, only to the bleeding-heart white liberals Zora Neale Hurston jokingly dubbed "Negrotarians").

This, at least, is the official story. In truth, however, the deepest inspiration for F.B. Eyes-the desire and fear and mystery that drove my book-derived from two separate visits to FBI headquarters.

Vacationing in Washington as a child in the early 1970s, I was taken on a tour of FBI headquarters, like hundreds of thousands of young American students before me. Then located in the white marble Department of Justice Building, opened in 1935, the headquarters I remember was filled with dusty criminological relics: gangster John Dillinger’s death mask, copies of Hoover’s famous “Ten Most Wanted” lists, and other tokens of the FBI’s genuinely impressive record as a crime-fighting powerhouse.

What struck me the hardest, however, was an illuminated map of the world featuring a large red button. Press it, and the extent of the “Communist world” lit up like an abstract but literal-minded Red Menace. What exactly did this map have to do with Dillinger and the bank robbers and kidnappers pictured in the Ten Most Wanted lists?, I wondered. Was Communism once illegal in the US, like manufacturing whiskey during Prohibition? Forty years later, I know the answer, but I still wonder about the FBI’s effort to blur the case.

My second visit to FBI headquarters came years into the writing of F.B. Eyes, after I had wrangled an invitation through David Sobonya, the contemporary Bureau's helpful information officer for FOIA requests. Armed only with a legal pad, I arrived one morning in August 2012 at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Bureau's block-square concrete citadel dedicated in 1975. Gaining access to the Bureau's "Seat of Government," now a highrise neo-brutalist fortress, had become more difficult since my childhood tour. In the wake of 9/11, group sightseeing at the Hoover Building is irregular, at best, and individual callers must penetrate weapons detectors, multiple credentials checks, and full-length chemical sensors looking like airlocks from a science fiction film.

Once through tightened security, I was welcomed by the FBI’s resident historian, Dr John F. Fox Jr., who kindly indulged my interest in seeing the building’s reading room, a place where declassified Bureau files can be examined on the premises. No desks overflowed with newly liberated files and exhilarated investigators; that day, no one at all occupied the computer stations and swivel chairs that made the reading room look like a modest commercial office.

Things were more stimulating inside Fox's personal office, where a portrait of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass hung on one wall (Fox's Ph.D. was earned in American history) and bookcases were stuffed with scholarship on his employer (the seemingly unneeded title Unlocking the Files of the FBI occupied one space).

We spoke freely about FBI historiography, which Fox is professionally committed to fostering and correcting, and agreed on the value of David Garrow's scrupulous book on the Bureau's harassment of Martin Luther King Jr.

Kirk Cromer, an experienced FOIA processor, joined us to talk about the development of the Record/Information Dissemination Section, the Bureau unit charged with answering FOIA requests. Cromer, an African American proud of his work with historians of the civil rights movement, estimated that in the mid-1970s blacks composed 40 to 50 per cent of the Bureau staff hired to answer FOIA inquiries. This proportion has dropped since the main FOIA office moved to northern Virginia, he observed, but he thought it likely that several of my files on African American writers had been closely read first by African American processors.

The conversation remained cordial, with the three of us, variously occupied by the FBI, agreeing to agree on much. When I asked Fox what he finally thought about the dealings between Hoover's Bureau and African Americans, however, the accord politely broke down. Hoover was a typically paternalistic racist of his day, Fox stated, but also a potent adversary of the Ku Klux Klan.

The “racial culture” of Hoover’s FBI was little different from the rest of the USfederal government, he claimed. The files I had gathered with the help of Fox and other affable Bureau employees had led me to different conclusions. Racial culture at the Hoover Bureau was hardly typical, these files instructed, not least when it came to the Hooverites’ fascinated policing of black literary culture.