John Reed

John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1887 and graduated from Harvard University. He became a prominent journalist, covering labor strikes and the Mexican Revolution for socialist and mainstream publications. In 1917, he traveled to Petrograd, where he witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power. His resulting book, "Ten Days That Shook the World" (1919), offers a vivid, partisan chronicle of the revolution and was praised by Lenin. Reed also co-founded the Communist Labor Party in the United States. He died of typhus in Moscow in 1920 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. His work is valued for its immersive, on-the-ground style and its influence on twentieth-century political journalism.