the spook who sat by the door is no more...,

WaPo |  Sam Greenlee was underappreciated, disgruntled, professionally disemboweled and perpetually agitated.

His sudden death at the age of 83 offers opportunity for reflection on a man trapped in the suspended animation of one great work that briefly elevated, then haunted, him into his last days. An apprehensive and highly educated foreign service officer who abruptly quit the business of American global dominance in anguished pursuit of a lifetime in written word, Greenlee spawned like a lost child of Ralph Ellison.

He will not be forgotten, but he will also be remembered in the starting lineup of a tortured lineage of creative black literary minds way ahead of their time. From George Schulyer (Black Empire) to Ellison (Invisible Man) to Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go), hard shift to Greenlee and then John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire), to Brent Wade (the Company Man genius who just … went missing) and now Todd Craig (Tor’cha), they and others are temporary flashes of a fire of brilliant black men’s acrimony shared through risky, genre-bending books. 
 

For Greenlee, risky was an understatement. To write, screenplay and release a film adaptation of a novel deconstructing the global white supremacy pyramid scheme was dangerous at that time, and he invited his own ostracism from the social grid. Few in this day and age of grainy, elevator-security-camera fight videos, overpriced designer headphones and LeBron James Android apps will celebrate the name, much less recall it. But Greenlee was the godfather of black rage long before The Boondocks’ creator, Aaron McGruder, became his stylish stepson—merely channeling select nuggets of Greenlee’s seminal The Spook Who Sat by the Door because, against the visceral boom bap and fading Africa emblems of Generation X, it was cool like that.

There were those of us who spoke of Spook as if speaking in a special, uniquely branded tongue of black revolutionary cryptography. You did not understand the rugged totality of modern black existence unless you were schooled in it, and suddenly we were all aspiring Dan Freemans in training. Greenlee’s semiautobiographical tour de force managed to tap into dark, revenge-filled fantasies of bold, brainy brothers outwitting The Man. 

Mr. Greenlee joined the U.S. Information Agency in 1957 and was among the its first black officials to serve overseas. He was stationed in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and Greece before quitting in 1965 to focus on writing. 

In his novel, Mr. Greenlee drew on his work with USIA but transformed the central character in “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” Dan Freeman, into a black CIA officer who quits the spy agency in disgust. Freeman returns to his native Chicago, where he puts his CIA training to use by organizing street gangs into a paramilitary black revolutionary movement that spreads nationwide. 

“My experiences were identical to those of Freeman in the CIA,” Mr. Greenlee told The Washington Post in 1973. “Everything in that book is an actual quote. If it wasn’t said to me, I overheard it.”

Mr. Greenlee’s novel was first published in England in 1969, after, he said, it was rejected by dozens of mainstream publishers in the United States.