Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950 brings together important new scholarship focused on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and its institutional presence in shaping and directing American print, film, and art culture. From Harlem to Hollywood, Hoover and his bureau workers were bent on decontaminating America’s creativity and this collection looks at the writers and artists who were tagged, tracked, and in some cases, trapped by the FBI. Contributors detail the threatening aspects of political power and critique the very historiography of modernism, acknowledging that modernism was on trial during those years.