John Gunther
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American author whose success came primarily in the 1940s and 1950s with a series of popular sociopolitical works known as the "Inside" books. Today he is frequently remembered for the memoir Death Be Not Proud about the death of his teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.
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[edit] Life and Works
Gunther grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago where he was literary editor of the student paper.
From 1924 to 1936 Gunther was assigned to the London bureau of the Chicago Daily News. Gunther writes, "I was at one time or another in charge of Daily News offices in London, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, and Paris, and I also visited Poland, Spain, the Balkans, and Scandinavia. I have worked in every European country except Portugal. I saw at first hand the whole extraordinary panorama of Europe from 1924 to 1936."
Gunther married journalist Frances Fineman in 1927. Their first child, a daughter, Judith, born in 1929, died suddenly at the age of four months. They had a son, Johnny, in 1930 and were divorced in 1944 following a stormy marriage. In 1947 17-year-old Johnny Gunther died after a 15-month struggle with a brain tumor.
Gunther married Jane Perry Vandercook in 1948 and the couple adopted a son.
Gunther's non-fiction works generally share the same title format: Inside Europe (1936), Inside Asia (1939), Inside Latin America (1940), Inside USA (1947), Inside Africa (1st edition 1955, reprinted 1957), Inside Europe Today (1961), Inside Australia and New Zealand (1972), and others.
About Inside Europe Gunther wrote, "This book has had a striking success all over the world. I was fortunate in that it appeared at just the right time, when the three totalitarian dictators took the stage and people began to be vitally interested in them."
In addition to his popular 'Inside' series, Gunther wrote eight novels and three biographies, most notably Bright Nemesis, The Troubled Midnight, and "Eisenhower", a biography of the famous general released in 1952, the year Eisenhower was elected President.
The book for which Gunther is best remembered today, however, does not deal with the intrigues of politics: Death Be Not Proud is the simple story of his son, Johnny, who died of a brain tumor at the age of 17. In the book, John Gunther relates in honest detail the struggles that he and his wife went through in attempting to save Johnny's life: the many treatments pursued (everything from radical surgery to strictly controlled diet), the ups and downs of apparent remission and eventual relapse, and the strain it placed on all three of them. Johnny was an evidently remarkable young man — he corresponded intelligently with Albert Einstein about physics — and the heartbreak of his death is told so movingly by Gunther that the book became a best-seller, and has subsequently been filmed. It is a staple of many high-school curricula to this day.
John Gunther died in New York in May 1970, two weeks after being diagnosed with cancer.
Inside: The Biography of John Gunther by Ken Cuthbertson was released in 1992.
[edit] List of works
[edit] Nonfiction
- (1936) Inside Europe
- (1939) The High Cost of Hitler
- (1939) Inside Asia
- (1941) Inside Latin America
- (1944) D-Day
- (1947) Inside U.S.A.
- (1949) Death Be Not Proud, memoir
- (1949) Behind the Curtain (published in the UK as Behind Europe's Curtain)
- (1950) Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History, biography
- (1951) The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea, and the Far East
- (1952) Eisenhower, the Man and the Symbol, biography
- (1953) Alexander the Great, biography
- (1955) Inside Africa
- (1956) Days to Remember: America, 1945-1955 (with B. Quint)
- (1958) Inside Russia Today
- (1961) Inside Europe Today
- (1965) Procession
- (1967) Inside South America
- (1969) Twelve Cities
- (1972) John Gunther's Inside Australia and New Zealand (with W. H. Forbis) ISBN 241-02180-4
[edit] Novels
- (1926) The Red Pavilion
- (1927) Peter Lancelot: An Amusement
- (1926) Eden for One: An Amusement
- (1929) The Golden Fleece
- (1932) Bright Nemesis
- (1945) The Troubled Midnight
- (1964) The Lost City
- (1970) The Indian Sign (published in the UK as Quatrain)
