The original dark satire of race relations in America, The Spook Who Sat By the Door is a literary classic and more relevant than ever.

Dan Freeman, 'the spook who sat by the door', is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program after a white senator decries the lack of Black officers in the agency. The first Black man in the Central Intelligence Agency, Freeman is given a desk job. Despite excelling, promotions are hard to come by as the token black in the CIA. Deciding he's had enough, Freeman uses the tactics he learns in the CIA to foment violent rebellion in Chicago, in a mirror image of the coups wrought around the world by the Agency itself.

With its focus on the militancy that characterised the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this is the story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy in ways that make the novel autobiographical and personal. As a tale of a reaction to the forces of oppression, this brilliant and funny satire by Sam Greenlee proves to be just as potent today as it was when it originally was published.