John Reed

John Reed (1887-1920), American journalist and revolutionist, born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Harvard University. After 1913 he was a member of the staff of the radical periodical The Masses. In 1914, as a war correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine, he won wide recognition for his articles on the Mexican revolution. He also reported on the strike of miners in Colorado in 1914. Following the outbreak of World War I, he became a war correspondent and later wrote The War in Eastern Europe (1916).

During his visit to Russia, Reed became a close friend of Lenin and witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in 1917. His best-known work is Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), an eyewitness account of the Bolshevik Revolution. On his return to the United States, Reed, with other members, was expelled from the National Socialist Convention in August 1919. The splinter group then formed the Communist Labor Party. Indicted for sedition, Reed escaped to the Soviet Union, where he died of typhus and was buried, with other Bolshevik leaders, at the Kremlin. He became a hero also in U.S. radical intellectual circles.