William J. Maxwell

Professor of English and African and African American Studies
Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature
PhD, Duke University
MA, Duke University
BA, Columbia University
research interests:
  • African American Literature
  • Modern and Contemporary American Literature
  • Modernism
  • US and Black Diasporan Cultural and Political History
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    • Washington University
    • CB 1122
    • One Brookings Dr.
    • St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    Professor Maxwell's scholarly research, rooted in both modernist and African American studies, explores the ties between Black writing and U.S. political history. 

    William J. Maxwell, a professor at Washington University since 2009 and the Fannie Hurst Chair since 2023, teaches courses in 20th- and 21st-century American and African American literatures. His articles and reviews have appeared in academic and popular journals including  African American Review, The American Historical Review, American Literary History, American Literature, Callaloo, Harper's, The Irish Times, The Journal of American History, Modernism/modernity, Politico, Publishers Weekly, Salon, and the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Maxwell is currently at work on  James Baldwinism Now: The Baldwin Revival and Twenty-First Century Memory. Contracted by Princeton University Press, this book charts the course of Baldwinism, the eager and inventive backward glance that has made Baldwin the twentieth-century African American writer most treasured in the twenty-first. Along the way, it recharts the life he lived firsthand and the crosscurrents of Black historical memory we live with today, almost forty years after his death. 

    Maxwell has published five books. The most recent, co-edited with Gary Edward Holcomb, was the first-ever edition of Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, a lost novel of Black migration, physical disability, and the meaning of reparations released by Penguin Classics in 2020. One of  New York Magazine’s top ten books of the year,  Romance was also named a  New York Times and  Sydney Morning Herald book of the week and a  New York Times Book Review editors’ pick.  

    Maxwell’s first book, New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars, issued by Columbia University Press in 1999, entered the debate over the involvement of African American writers in the “Old,” pro-Soviet left. In contrast to prior studies focused on the Great Depression,  New Negro, Old Left traced the source of the “Black-Red thread” to the dawning of the Harlem Renaissance, a moment when the definition of the modern New Negro and the direction of the young Soviet Union were still unsettled and still imagined as related matters.  New Negro, Old Left was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice and remains in print. 

    Maxwell’s second book, an edition of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems, was published by the University of Illinois Press in various formats in 2004, 2008, and 2013. Containing more than 300 poems, including nearly one hundred previously unpublished works, the  Complete Poems was the first comprehensive collection of the verse of this pioneer of the Harlem and West Indian renaissances.  

    Maxwell’s third book,  F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. At first glance, few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover’s white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes, the FBI’s hostility to Black protest was energized by fear of and respect for Black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposed the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. F.B. Eyes was recognized by a 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Shortlisted for the 2016 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, it was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice; as a  Publishers Weekly and  San Francisco Chronicle book of the week; as an  Economist best book about literary surveillance; and as one of the twenty-five best nonfiction books of 2015 by the  St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The book’s companion website, The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive, presents high-quality copies of 51 FBI files on African American authors and literary institutions obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Also exploring the links between the Bureau and Black literature, Maxwell’s fourth book, James Baldwin: The FBI File, published by Arcade/Simon & Schuster in 2017, dove deeply into a single FBI file, the longest yet discovered on an individual African American writer. 

    Maxwell was appointed to the editorial board of  PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association (MLA), in 2024.  He has served on the MLA divisional committees on both Black American and 20th-century American literatures, and was the 2021 President of the international Modernist Studies Association (MSA). A former book review editor of  African American Review and member of the editorial board of  American Literature, he is now a contributing editor at  American Literary History and  James Baldwin Review. 

    Romance in Marseille

    Romance in Marseille

    Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers–collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms “an amputated man.” Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay’s novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the “stowaway era” of black cultural politics and McKay’s challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

    Complete Poems

    Complete Poems

    Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism.

    McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.

    James Baldwin: The FBI File

    James Baldwin: The FBI File

    Decades before Black Lives Matter returned James Baldwin to prominence, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI considered the Harlem-born author the most powerful broker between black art and black power. Baldwin’s 1,884-page FBI file, covering the period from 1958 to 1974, was the largest compiled on any African American artist of the Civil Rights era. This collection of once-secret documents, never before published in book form, captures the FBI’s anxious tracking of Baldwin’s writings, phone conversations, and sexual habits—and Baldwin’s defiant efforts to spy back at Hoover and his G-men.

    James Baldwin: The FBI File reproduces over one hundred original FBI records, selected by the noted literary historian whose award-winning book, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, brought renewed attention to bureau surveillance. William J. Maxwell also provides an introduction exploring Baldwin's enduring relevance in the time of Black Lives Matter along with running commentaries that orient the reader and offer historical context, making this book a revealing look at a crucial slice of the American past—and present.

    New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars

    New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars

    Howard "Stretch" Johnson, a charismatic Harlemite who graduated from Cotton Club dancer to Communist Party youth leader, once claimed that in late 1930s New York "75% of black cultural figures had Party membership or maintained regular meaningful contact with the Party." He stretched the truth, but barely. In a broad-ranging, revisionary account of the extensive relationship between African-American literary culture and Communism in the 1920s and 1930s, William J. Maxwell uncovers both black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to black literature—reciprocal obligations first incurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

    Juxtaposing well-known and newly rediscovered works by Claude McKay, Andy Razaf, Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nelson Algren, Maxwell maintains that the "Old," Soviet-allied Left promoted a spectrum of exchanges between black and white authors, genres, theories, and cultural institutions. Channels opened between radical Harlem and Bolshevik Moscow, between the New Negro renaissance and proletarian literature. Claude McKay's 1922-23 pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, for example, usually recalled as a lighthearted adventure in radical tourism, actually jumpstarted the Comintern's controversial nation-centered program for Afro America. Breaking from studies governed by Cold War investments and pivoting on the Great Depression, Maxwell argues that Communism's rare sustenance for African-American initiative—not a seduction of Depression-scarred innocents—brought scores of literary "New Negroes" to the Old Left.

    F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

    F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

    Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.