Bookforum recently emailed some links to read up on in advance of its Fall 2025 issue. On the list: Gene Seymour’s Summer 2017 review of James Baldwin: The FBI File, William J. Maxwell’s deep dive into the declassified records of the FBI’s most extensive surveillance of a Black writer. Maxwell would know, after publishing a survey of the US government’s investigations of Black literary figures in 2015, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.
What stuck out from Maxwell’s second book is Baldwin’s response to discovering in 1963 that he and the Civil Rights Movement leaders in Selma, Alabama were all being monitored by the FBI, surveilled by agents of their own country’s government, but not protected when other agents of the state attacked them. Baldwin announced, publicly and repeatedly, that his bestselling novel, Another Country (1962), his next book was going to be about Hoover and the FBI, and their central role in America’s “race problem.”
There’s evidence throughout the book that Baldwin gave back to the FBI as good as he got, baiting the easily baitable Hoover by declaring in a 1963 television interview that the director “was part of the problem in the civil rights movement.”
The book obviously didn’t happen, but it’s not clear whether Baldwin ever meant for it to, either. Was he actually was working on the book, titled The Blood Counters, or did he use the looming possibility of such an exposé as a taunt and a feint for his FBI adversaries? Maxwell traces the documentation of the FBI’s frantic efforts to find out, and to, if possible, prevent its publication.
Maxwell seems to make as much effort to present The Blood Counters as a conceptual vaporware meant to bait Hoover personally as he does on the idea that this far-reaching surveillance, involving dozens of agents and even more informants reporting from wherever Baldwin traveled or spoke, was actually a personal contest of wills between these two men. It might, in retrospect, be more useful to look at how many eager collaborators the FBI found in New York’s publishing industry, and what actual books they successfully spiked, or writers they successfully silenced.
Maxwell notes a diminished output for Baldwin in 1964, which may have represented lost work on The Blood Counters. Or maybe it was just the stress of living under government surveillance. The Blood Counters was the story Baldwin had to tell in order to live, but it’s not clear if he was telling it to himself, or just to his official menacers.
And now this all feels remarkably quaint and humane in the face of an unresrained digital dragnet that logs your DMs and knows exactly how far you haven’t gotten in your Google Docs draft.