We released the first in our MIT Press series, “Writers Under Surveillance,” two years ago today.

MuckRock is excited to announce that thanks to the generous support of MIT Press, JPat Brown and Beryl Lipton will be presenting a talk this weekend at the 2019 Oxford Literary Festival on our book, Writers under Surveillance: The FBI Files.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation files on James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Sontag, and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them. Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.

After a year of hard work, our first professionally published book, Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files, is almost here! It’s set for release Sept. 18, from MIT Press, so we’re hosting an informal book launch party at The Field on 19th the in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After a little over two years of processing, the National Archives and Records Administration has released the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on the writer Dorothy Parker - the first time those files have been made public since the FBI removed them from their FOIA reading room over a decade ago.

A heavily-redacted portion of Ayn Rand’s Federal Bureau of Investigation file documents an investigation into a mysterious screenplay sent to the author. An inventor reached out to Rand, hoping for help in getting the Hollywood treatment for his life’s story. What was in that life story caused her to call the FBI.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation never conducted an investigation focused on acclaimed author Truman Capote, who was at work on his classic In Cold Blood when his name first appeared in the Bureau’s files. Though the agency declined to look into direct requests related to the writer’s safety and reputation, his file nevertheless stretches over 100 pages, in no small part because he was among those who supported, for a time, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

FBI files on Ernest Hemingway document the author’s late-life feud with a New Zealand journalist in Cuba that apparently came close to causing an international incident - and led to the 55-year old Hemingway being challenged to a duel.

In a fitting birthday tribute to the man the FBI deemed “bizarre, but not dangerous,” we rounded up the strangest lines from the Bureau’s security report - some of them poetry unto themselves.

James Baldwin’s unflinching critique of racial unrest in America - and the government’s role in perpetuating it - earned him a spot on several FBI watchlists, and Bureau surveillance of his every move. However, Baldwin’s files show that on at least one occasion he was able to turn that scrutiny to his advantage.