American Notes LITERATURE

J. Edgar Hoover liked his FBI agents to have degrees in law, accounting or both, but it now turns out that the bureau could have used some Ph.D.s in English. Both The New Yorker and The Nation magazines last week documented nearly half a century of FBI surveillance of more than 100 prominent American writers, including six Nobel laureates (Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill and John Steinbeck). The gumshoe lit crit was sometimes comically inept. FBI files, for example, described the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay as possibly subversive because she used the "analogy of the mole boring under the garden."

Only a few of the shadowed authors were aware of the surveillance. "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels?" wrote John Steinbeck to Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1942. "It's getting tiresome."