The Spook Who Sat By The Door by Sam Greenlee BIPOC African American Black Author Author Bantam 1970 Edition 1976 Printing RARE Cover

The Spook Who Sat By The Door
Sam Greenlee
Bantam Paperback 1970 - 13th Printing 1976
RARE Front Cover
Condition: good vintage condition - Typical shelf wear, age / color yellowing on outer pages, slight creases on a few pages, but no major issues -no writing or markings.
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From Wikipedia...
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
It was while living on Mykonos that Greenlee began to write his first and best known novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which was the story of a black man, Dan Freeman, who is recruited as a CIA officer and having mastered the skills of espionage then uses them to lead a black guerrilla movement in the United States. Greenlee drew on his own background and his career in the US Foreign Service, and in a 1973 interview with the Washington Post he said: "My experiences were identical to those of Freeman in the CIA....Everything in that book is an actual quote. If it wasn't said to me, I overheard it." The novel's title incorporates a double-entendre, "spook" being an ironic street term for a black person as well as slang for "spy".

Rejected multiple times by mainstream publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door was eventually published in London in March 1969 by fledgling company Allison and Busby, Greenlee having been introduced to young Ghanaian-born publisher Margaret Busby by a mutual friend in Mykonos. The book achieved significant critical attention and was subsequently published in the US by Richard W. Baron.

Greenlee later co-wrote (with Mel Clay) the screenplay for what became the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door that he co-produced with director Ivan Dixon, and which is considered "one of the more memorable and impassioned films that came out around the beginning of the notoriously polarizing blaxploitation era." In 2011, an independent documentary entitled Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat by the Door was filmed by Christine Acham and Clifford Ward, about the making and reception of the Spook film, in which Greenlee spoke out about the suppression of the film soon after its release. In a chance meeting with Aubrey Lewis (1935–2001), one of the first Black FBI agents to have been recruited in 1962 by the FBI, Greenlee was told that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

(Gma D's Estate)