Samuel Greenlee
*Samuel Greenlee was born on July 13, 1930. He was a Black writer of fiction and poetry.
Samuel Eldred Greenlee, Jr., was born in Chicago, Illinois, to singer and dancer Desoree Alexander and railroad man and union activist Samuel Greenlee. He grew up in West Woodlawn, attended Englewood High School, and, in 1948, won a track scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. He graduated in 1952 with a B.S. in political science. Greenlee was a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity (Beta Omicron 1950).
He served in the United States Army from 1952 to 1954 as a first lieutenant, and from 1954 to 1957 did graduate studies in international relations at the University of Chicago. In 1957, Greenlee began a career with the United States Information Agency (USIA) and served in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece between 1957 and 1965 as one of the first Black officials to work overseas. Leaving the USIA after eight years, he stayed in Greece, where he undertook further study (1963–64) at the University of Thessaloniki. He lived for three years on the island of Mykonos with his Dutch-born first wife, Nienke de Jonge. While living on Mykonos, Greenlee began to write his first and best-known novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
Greenlee drew on his own background and his career in the U.S. Foreign Service, and in a 1973 interview with the Washington Post, he said: "My experiences were identical to those of Freeman in the C.I.A. Everything in that book is an actual quote. If it wasn't said to me, I overheard it." The novel's title incorporates a double-entendre, "spook" being a racial slur for a Black person and slang for "spy" or intelligence agent. But his sardonic wordplay, Greenlee insisted, had a third layer of meaning: 'that an armed revolution by Black people haunts White America, and has for centuries.'" Rejected multiple times by mainstream publishers globally, The Spook Who Sat by the Door was eventually published in London in March 1969 by fledgling company Allison and Busby.
The book achieved significant critical attention and was subsequently published in the U.S. Greenlee later co-wrote (with Mel Clay) the screenplay for what became the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which he co-produced with director Ivan Dixon. In a chance meeting with Aubrey Lewis, one of the first Black F.B.I. agents to have been recruited in 1962 by the F.B.I., Greenlee was told by him that The Spook Who Sat by the Door was required reading at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Other works by Greenlee include Baghdad Blues, a 1976 novel, Blues for an African Princess (a 1971 collection of poems), and Ammunition(poetry, 1975). He also wrote short stories and plays (although he found no producer for any of them) and wrote the screenplay for a film short called Lisa Trotter (2010).
Greenlee lived in Ghana and Spain for some years before returning to Chicago in the late 1980s. His marriage to Nienke Greenlee ended in divorce; subsequently, from a long-term relationship with Maxine McCrey, he had a daughter, Natiki. In 1990, he was named the Poet Laureate of Chicago. He taught screenwriting at Columbia College Chicago and hosted a talk show on W.V.O.N. radio. He also worked on an autobiography that was to be called Sam's Blues: Adventures of a Travelling Man. On May 19, 2014, Greenlee died in Chicago at 83.
On June 6, 2014, Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History sponsored an evening of celebration in his honor. 2018, Greenlee was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, and on July 13, 2022, Sam Greenlee Day was celebrated around Chicago's South Side.
