John Reed

The American journalist John Reed was born in Portland, United States, in 1887, died in Moscow from typhus in 1920, and was buried in the Kremlin. A Harvard University graduate (1910) and a restless spirit among the radicals of Greenwich Village, he covered Pancho Villa's revolution in Mexico (1911) as a correspondent, and later the atrocities of World War I in Eastern Europe. He became widely known for his now-classic work "Ten Days That Shook the World" (English edition 1919), a detailed and revealing political chronicle of the October Revolution, published in America with a preface by V.I. Lenin, and in Russia, after his death, with a preface by N. Krupskaya. After the book's publication in America, Reed returned to his country to coordinate the founding of the communist party there, but on his return journey to Russia, he was arrested and imprisoned in Finland. He was eventually released, reached Moscow where he reunited with his partner Louise Bryant, but weakened, he fell ill in October 1920 and died of typhus. Other books resulting from his daring journalistic missions include "Insurgent Mexico," 1914, and "The War in Eastern Europe," 1916, from which excerpts have been translated into Greek.