The novelist John O. Killens (1916-1987), twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, urged fellow African American writers to join the “crusade to decolonize the minds of black people.” After serving in the South Pacific during WWII, he moved to New York in search of literary stimulation, co-founding the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950, a long-running workshop that tightened the prose of Maya Angelou, John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, and many others. Killens’s second novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), drew from his experience as an African American in the U.S. Army and has made several lists of the best American fiction of World War II. His first and third novels, Youngblood (1954) and ’Sippi (1967), qualify as southern anti-romances. The Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), a Black Arts-era satire, targets both class snobbery and revolutionary affectations in the African American elite. Initially investigated by the FBI in 1941, years prior to his literary success, Killens became a long-term study for J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostreaders, his file open until 1973.