John Gunther

John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American journalist and author whose success came primarily through a series of popular sociopolitical works known as the "Inside" books (1936–1972), including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. He is best known today for the memoir Death Be Not Proud about the death of his beloved teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.

Gunther was born in the Lakeview district of Chicago, growing up on the North Side of the city. He was the first child of a family of German descent. His father was Eugene Guenther, a traveling salesman and his mother was Lizette Schoeninger Guenther. During World War I the family changed the spelling of its name from Guenther to Gunther in order to avoid having a German-sounding name.

In 1922, he was awarded a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, where he was literary editor of the student paper.

He worked briefly in the city as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, but soon moved to Europe to be a correspondent with the Daily News's London Bureau, where he covered Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East.

Gunther met Frances Fineman in London in 1925 and the two were married in 1927. Through 1936 they worked together—Frances as a foreign correspondent for the London News Chronicle—throughout Europe. Gunther wrote, "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." In Vienna, Gunther worked alongside a group of English-speaking central European correspondents that included Marcel Fodor, Dorothy Thompson, Robert Best, and George Eric Rowe Gedye.

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