Dangerous Dossiers is as powerful and relevant today as it was when it first made worldwide headlines 25 years ago: a chilling reminder of the dangers of unfettered government intrusion into the lives and beliefs of private citizens, whether famous or not.
This shocking account by award-winning author and former New York Times cultural reporter Herbert Mitgang provided hard evidence for the first time of the decades-long cultural war waged by the FBI and other federal intelligence-gathering agencies against scores of the world's most renowned writers and artists. Using the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose actual surveillance files kept by the FBI, Mitgang documented that the targets of government snooping included a who's-who of the literary and artistic worlds whom J. Edgar Hoover and his red-baiting legions suspected of communist leanings or outright disloyalty, usually with no basis whatsoever. They included: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Carl Sandburg, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, and Allen Ginsburg; and artists including Alexander Calder, Georgia O'Keefe, and Henry Moore.
Called "a fascinating, illuminating and above all, morally decent book" by The New York Times, and "first-class journalism" by The Associated Press, this exposé and the many "dangerous dossiers" it contains reveal no evidence of guilt on the part of the targets of the FBI witch-hunts. But Mitgang finds plenty of proof of the paranoia, political bias, and cultural illiteracy of those who controlled the nation's most powerful investigative agencies.

Herbert Mitgang was an author, editor, journalist, historian, and playwright. In a career spanning some 60 years, he wrote or edited 18 books, including: The Letters of Carl Sandburg; several works on Abraham Lincoln ( Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait and The Fiery Trial: A Life of Lincoln); The Man Who Rode the Tiger, a biography of crusading New York Judge Samuel Seabury; four novels, and several collections of his book reviews and literary conversations with the world's leading authors. He has written two plays: Mister Lincoln, a one-man play on the life of Lincoln which was produced on Broadway, at Ford's Theater in Washington, and many other venues around the country; and Adlai, Alone, a one-man play about Adlai E. Stevenson.
During World War II, Mitgang was an army correspondent with Stars and Stripes and served as managing editor of the Oran-Casablanca and Sicily editions, earning 6 battle stars. After the war, he joined The New York Times. During a 47-year career at the newspaper, he was supervising editor of the drama section of the Sunday edition and was a member of the editorial board for 12 years. He was the first deputy editor of the OP Ed page that he helped create, and was the paper's publishing correspondent and a daily book critic until his retirement from The Times in 1995. He was a longtime member and past president of both the Authors League Fund and the Authors Guild. He was named a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and was a member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Mitgang died in 2013 at age 93.