author
John Reed
1887–1920
A restless reporter and radical witness to revolution, this American writer turned firsthand experience into some of the most vivid political journalism of his era. He is best known for Ten Days That Shook the World, his dramatic account of the Russian Revolution.
2 Audiobooks
Ten Days That Shook the World
by John Reed
Insurgent Mexico
by John Reed
About the author
Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1887, John Reed came from a comfortable family but was drawn early to writing, politics, and adventure. After graduating from Harvard in 1910, he built a name for himself as a journalist and poet, writing with unusual energy and sympathy about working people, social conflict, and war.
Reed reported on the Mexican Revolution and World War I, but his most famous work grew out of his time in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution of 1917. That experience became Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that secured his lasting reputation and made him one of the best-known eyewitness writers of the revolutionary age.
His political commitments became more intense in his final years, and he was involved in the American socialist and communist movements as well as literary life in Greenwich Village. Reed died in Moscow in 1920, still in his early thirties, leaving behind a short but remarkably influential body of writing.