John Reed

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1887, John Reed studied at Harvard and emerged as a poet, reporter, and restless observer of political upheaval. He wrote for progressive publications including The Masses and quickly built a reputation for energetic, on-the-ground reporting.

Reed covered labor struggles, the Mexican Revolution, and World War I, bringing a dramatic, human voice to events that many readers knew only from headlines. His most famous book, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), grew out of his time in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution and remains the work most closely associated with his name.

His life was as intense as his writing. Deeply involved in radical politics, Reed helped found the Communist Labor Party in the United States. He died in Moscow in 1920 at just 32, leaving behind a small but powerful body of work that still stands out for its immediacy, conviction, and sense of history happening in real time.