John Gunther was an American journalist and author whose success came primarily in the 1940s and 1950s with a series of popular sociopolitical works known as the "Inside" books. He is best known today for the memoir Death Be Not Proud about the death of his teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor. Gunther grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago, where he was literary editor of the student paper. He also attended Deerfield Academy for his high school education. 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." The books that made Gunther famous in his time were the "Inside" series of continental surveys.
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