Before he committed suicide in 1961, Ernest Hemingway raved about being under FBI surveillance and how agents were tapping his phones. Many years later, his friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner charged that his FBI file, released under the Freedom of Information Act, proved that this paranoia was based on reality: that J. Edgar Hoover, worried about Hemingway’s fondness for Fidel Castro and still incensed over his support for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, had harassed the Nobel Prize winner and contributed to his “anguish and suicide.”

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