The Spook who Sat by the Door: A Novel

Front Cover
Wayne State University Press, 1990 - Biography & Autobiography - 248 pages

An explosive, award-winning novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a 50-year-young classic that provides commentary on the racial inequities in the US in the late 1960s - and today.

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in the late 1960s. With its focus on the "militancy" that characterized the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this is the story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy in ways that make the novel autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a reaction to the forces of oppression, this book is universal.

Dan Freeman, the "spook who sat by the door," is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Black Chicagoans to combat racism as "Freedom Fighters" in this explosive novel.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
12
Section 3
28
Section 4
40
Section 5
49
Section 6
59
Section 7
66
Section 8
77
Section 12
134
Section 13
147
Section 14
162
Section 15
173
Section 16
188
Section 17
200
Section 18
217
Section 19
227

Section 9
89
Section 10
105
Section 11
121
Section 20
236
Copyright

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About the author (1990)

Sam Greenlee was born on July 13, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a B.S. in political science from the University of Wisconsin in 1952 and attended the University of Chicago. He was one of the first African Americans to join the U.S. foreign service. From 1957 to 1965, he worked for the U.S. Information Agency and served in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece. He was the author of Blues for an African Princess, Baghdad Blues: The Revolution That Brought Saddam Hussein to Power, and Ammunition!: Poetry and Other Raps. He was best known for The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which was published in 1969 and adapted into a film in 1973. He died on May 19, 2014 at the age of 83.