John REED (1887 - 1920): Born in Portland, Oregon: poet-adventurer whose short life as a revolutionary writer and activist made him the hero of a generation of radical intellectuals. Graduated from Harvard in 1910 and began writing for a Socialist newspaper, The Masses, in 1913. Both at Harvard, and immediately after, in Greenwich Village, Reed maintained a close friendship with fellow-bohemian poet Alan Seeger, who later became the most famous American poet of World War I. (see The Bohemian Friendship of John Reed & Alan Seeger). In 1914, Reed joined troops fighting under Pancho Villa and covered the revolutionary fighting in Mexico, recording his impressions in Insurgent Mexico (1914). Frequently arrested for organizing and defending strikes, he rapidly became established as a radical leader and help form the Communist Party in the United States. He covered World War I for Metropolitan magazine; out of this experience came The War in Eastern Europe (1916). Reed became a close friend of Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, recording this event in his best known book, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), the single finest first-hand account of the October Revolution. When the U.S. Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party split in 1919, Reed became the leader of the latter. Indicted for treason, he escaped to the Soviet Union where, along with millions of Russians, he died of typhus that could not be treated because of the blockade imposed on the fledgling Soviet government by the Allies; he was subsequently buried with other Bolshevik heroes beside the Kremlin wall.


Reed, John, Diana's Debut. Lyrics by J.S. Reed, music by Walter S. Langshaw, Cambridge: privately printed, 1910.

~~~~~~~~~~, Sangar. Riverside, Conn.: Frederick C. Bursch, 1913.

~~~~~~~~~~, The Day in Bohemia, or Life Among the Artists. Riverside, Conn.: privately printed, 1913.

~~~~~~~~~~, Everymagazine, An Immorality Play. Words by Jack Reed, music by Bill Daly. New York: privately printed, 1913.

~~~~~~~~~~, Insurgent Mexico, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914.

~~~~~~~~~~, The War in Eastern Europe. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916.

~~~~~~~~~~, Tamburlaine. Riverside, Conn.: Frederick C. Bursch, 1917.

~~~~~~~~~~, The Sisson Documents. New York: Liberator Publishing Company, 1918.

~~~~~~~~~~, Ten Days That Shook the World. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.

~~~~~~~~~~, Daughter of the Revolution, edited by Floyd Dell. New York: Vanguard Press, 1927.

~~~~~~~~~~, Collected Poems, edited by Corliss Lamont, Lawrence Hill & Company, 1985.

Hicks, Granville, John Reed, the Making of a Revolutionary, The Macmillan Company, 1936.

Rosenstone, Robert A., Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.