Sixteen Authors With Extensive FBI Files

While the FBI was known to maintain records and files on almost every celebrity of any stripe, the following writers all had extensive records maintained about them -- in most cases because it was believed that they espoused communist or socialist causes and beliefs and/or were openly critical of US politics:

1. James Baldwin*

2. E. E. Cummings

3. W.E. B. Dubois*

4. William Faulkner

5. Allen Ginsberg

6. Ernest Hemingway

7. Langston Hughes*

8. Aldous Huxley

9. Arthur Miller

10. Ezra Pound

11. Gene Roddenberry

12. Carl Sagan

13. John Steinbeck

14. Tennessee Williams

15. Truman Capote

16. Richard Wright*


*Basically every Black writer in the US of any note has an FBI file, it should be noted. Others included Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain LeRoy Locke, Alex Haley, and others.

Source: Some of these files can be obtained online at foia.fbi.gov but most require a formal request to the Record Information/Dissemination Section of the Records Management Division, FBI, Dept. of Justice, 935 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, Washington DC 20535