John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American journalist and writer.
His success came primarily by a series of popular sociopolitical works, known as the "Inside" books (1936–1972), including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. However, he is now best known for his memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949), on the death of his teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.
Gunther was born in 1901 in the Lakeview district of Chicago and grew up on the North Side of the city. He was the first child of a German-American family: his father was Eugene Guenther, a traveling salesman; his mother Lizette Schoeninger Guenther.
During World War I, the family changed the spelling of its name from Guenther to Gunther to avoid having an obviously-German name.
In 1922, he was awarded a Bachelor of Philosophy 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 he soon moved to Europe to be a correspondent with the Daily News 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. Until 1936, they worked together (Frances as a foreign correspondent for London's 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.
Gunther later described those years as
the bubbling, blazing days of American foreign correspondence in Europe. ... Most of us traveled steadily, met constantly, exchanged information, caroused, took in each other's washing, and, even when most fiercely competitive, were devoted friends. ... We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.
According to Michael Bloch, Gunther enjoyed a same-sex relationship in the 1930s in Vienna with the future Leader of the British Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell.
Gunther's experiences as a journalist in interwar Vienna formed the basis for his novel The Lost City.
His research and the contacts that Gunther developed as a reporter also led directly to the first of the Inside books, Inside Europe, which was intended by Gunther to summarize the European political situation for the general reader. With the success of the Inside books starting in the late 1930s, Gunther resigned his position to devote his full-time to the books. During World War II, he worked as a war correspondent in Europe.
The Gunthers had two children: Judy, who died in 1929 before the age of 1, and John Jr. (Johnny), who was born in 1929 and died in 1947 of a brain tumor. The Gunthers divorced in 1944.
Gunther married Jane Perry Vandercook in 1948; the two adopted a son. Jane P. Gunther, a devoted student of the arts who accompanied her husband on his voyages and contributed to his books, was born in August 1916. She died in New York City, on May 22, 2020, at the age of 103. She had been widowed for a week shy of half a century.
Gunther died of liver cancer in 1970.
The books that made Gunther famous in his time were the "Inside" series of continental surveys. For each book, Gunther traveled extensively through the area the book covered, interviewed political, social, and business leaders; talked with average people; reviewed area statistics; and then wrote a lengthy overview of what he had learned and how he interpreted it.
About Inside Europe (published in 1936), Gunther wrote, "This book has had a striking success all over the world. I was fortunate in that it appeared at just the right time, when the three totalitarian dictators took the stage and people began to be vitally interested in them."
In 1947, Gunther tackled Inside U.S.A., visiting all 48 states. On the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., appraised the book and its impact: