John Reed

(1887 - 1920)

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1887, John Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910 and rapidly became one of America’s leading radicals. He wrote for a number of Socialist periodicals, was frequently arrested for his participation in labor strikes, helped form the Communist Party in the United States, and became a close friend of Lenin. His best-known book, Ten Days That Shook the World, is a firsthand account of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. After being indicted for treason in 1919, Reed fled to the Soviet Union, where he died of typhus the following year.