John Gunther was born in Chicago, August 30, 1901, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1922. He became a reporter for the Chicago Daily News at the age of twenty-one and spent the next quarter century actively covering the field of news reports, interviews, and broadcasts. He is among the best known foreign reporters in the world, and as an author on foreign countries is perhaps as widely read as any other writer. He is a frequent contributor to magazines.
In 1924-26 John Gunther was a London correspondent for the Daily News and through the next ten years successively served as correspondent in Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Rome, the Scandinavian countries, Geneva, Spain, the Near East, Central Europe, and the Balkan area. In 1935-36 he was back in London. On the eve of the second World War he visited seventeen European countries to broadcast for NBC, covered the outbreak of the war from London in 1939, and was accredited to Eisenhower's headquarters in the Mediterranean area in 1943, as a reporter. He was a special consultant to the U. S. War Department from 1942 to 1944.
Gunther has interviewed most of the leading political figures of the world in his career, including Gandhi, Trotsky, Chiang Kai-shek, and Lloyd George; and has covered most of the notable events of Europe. He visited the twenty countries of South America in 1940-41 and interviewed seventeen heads of government. Between 1939 and 1944 he broadcast from New York for the Blue Network.
Since 1944 John Gunther has devoted his time almost exclusively to writing. Among his fifteen books, perhaps the best known are Inside Europe, Inside Asia, Inside Latin America, Inside Africa, and Inside the U.S.A., most of which have been revised more then once. Other notable books include The Troubled Midnight (1945), Roosevelt in Retrospect (1950), Eisenhower, the Man and the Symbol (1952), and Days to Remember (with Bernard Quint-1955).
