I'm looking for the name of a short story I read in a SF anthology in the early 90's, but I don't know the anthology's publication date. I think the story was written before 1970.
The story develops over a series of diary entries, or in the form of reports to a home office. An unnamed man moves into a suburb and begins creating mischief. He makes anonymous calls and spreads gossip as if he were making innocuous conversation. He steals things and leaves them in neighbors' yards. There is an African-American family in the neighborhood and he writes racist graffiti on their house. He does other malicious things and leaves evidence to implicate other neighbors. He ramps up the "pranks" as time goes on and by the end of the story the neighbors are at each others' throats and ready to kill one another. As he moves out he records with some satisfaction that he's successfully set the entire neighborhood against one another and is ready to move on to a new "assignment". He may actually work for some kind of agency or perhaps he's just a lunatic. It's never really clear. The guy writing is almost like a travelling salesman; he seems logical and rational and he's very methodical.
Like I said, it was in a SF anthology, but it's not a SF story with futuristic elements, or special powers, nothing easily identifable as SF. Not even sure why it was in an SF anthology at all. Maybe because the author was generally a writer of SF. I don't recall the name of the anthology but is was a grey hardback. One of the other stories in the anthology was T. Sturgeon's Shottle Bop. I'm not sure what other stories were in it, but it may have included Bester's short novel The Stars My Destination. My various Google searches haven't been fruitful.
