On October 19, 1992, I wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation requesting under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to see Rebecca West’s file. I had made a similar request for Lillian Hellman’s file, and after several months—with help from my congressman—I received hundreds of pages of reports on Hellman’s activities.¹ She had belonged to several Communist Front organizations. She had been involved in labor union drives in California. She was an outspoken leftist and was often called a Stalinist. Most dramatically, she had had an affair with John Melby, a foreign service officer she had met in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Even after names had been blacked out, the file was a fund of information. It contained accounts from informants and interviews with Hellman’s friends and associates. This was raw data—though the word data is misleading, since it implies factual material, and FBI files are more like gossip sheets that have to be stringently checked. Errors abound, not merely about a subject’s political opinions and affiliations, but also about the basics of his or her life. Unlike The New Yorker, the FBI does not employ fact checkers for its files. Nevertheless, these files help to pin down dates, episodes, and scenes in a subject’s life. No biographer should be without the FBI dossier of his or her subject—if such a file exists.

I was sure there was a file on Rebecca West (1892–1983),