Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950 brings
together important new scholarship focused on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and
its institutional presence in shaping and directing American print,
film, and art culture. From Harlem to Hollywood, Hoover and his bureau
workers were bent on decontaminating America's creativity and this
collection looks at the writers and artists who were tagged, tracked,
and in some cases, trapped by the FBI. Contributors detail the
threatening aspects of political power and critique the very
historiography of modernism, acknowledging that modernism was on trial
during those years.