The Spook Who Sat by the Door (novel)

The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Front cover of the 1989 Wayne State University Press edition
Cover of the 1989 Wayne State University Press edition
AuthorSam Greenlee
LanguageEnglish
PublisherLondon, UK: Allison & Busby; New York: USA: Richard W. Baron Publishing Co.; Detroit: USA: Wayne State University Press
Publication date
March 1969; 55 years ago (March 1969)
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint
Pages182
OCLC491599651
813/.5/4
LC ClassPZ4.G8146 Sp PS3557.R396
Followed byBlues for an African Princess 

The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), by Sam Greenlee, is the fictional story of Dan Freeman, the first black CIA officer, and of the CIA's history of training persons and political groups who later used their specialised training in gathering intelligence, political subversion, and guerrilla warfare against the CIA. The novel has been characterised as "part thriller, part satire and part social commentary".[1] As described by The New Yorker, the title "alludes to the conspicuous deployment of the agency's one black officer to display its phony integration".[2]

The author, Sam Greenlee, was told by Aubrey Lewis (1935–2001), one of the first black FBI agents recruited to the Bureau in 1962,[3] that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.[4] Having been much rejected by mainstream publishers, Greenlee's spy novel first was published by Allison & Busby in the UK in March 1969, after the author met Ghanaian-born editor Margaret Busby in London the previous year,[5] and in the US by the Richard W. Baron Publishing Company. It was subsequently translated into several languages, including French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Finnish, Swedish, and German.[5][6]

  1. ^ Bates, Karen Grigsby (22 May 2014). "Remembering Sam Greenlee Through His Most Famous Book". NPR.
  2. ^ Brody, Richard (20 July 2018). "The Troubling Fate of a 1973 Film About the First Black Man in the C.I.A." The New Yorker.
  3. ^ Goldstein, Richard (13 December 2001). "Aubrey Lewis, 66, Athlete Who Was an F.B.I. Pioneer". The New York Times.
  4. ^ Reese, Gregg (22 May 2014). "Radical novelist Sam Greenlee dies at 83". Our Weekly. Los Angeles.
  5. ^ a b Busby, Margaret (2 June 2014). "Sam Greenlee obituary". The Guardian.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Race and the Revolutionary Impulse was invoked but never defined (see the help page).