Yale Library Book Talk: Book and Dagger by Elyse Graham

Elyse Graham, Professor of English at Stony Brook University, will present on her new book “Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.”

At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts.

In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war.

Elyse Graham’s previous book is “The Republic of Games: Textual Culture Between Old Books and New Media,” published in 2018. Her research focuses on the future of books and textual culture in the internet age. She also writes about the history of the English language—and in particular the history of the English language in New York City.