John Reed
Reed, John (Silas) (1887-1920), a United States journalist and revolutionary. He is best known for Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), an eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Reed was born in Portland, Oregon, into a wealthy family, and he graduated from Harvard University in 1910. Influenced by Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, he became interested in social reform; he wrote for several liberal magazines and in 1913 became an editor of the radical magazine The Masses. He was a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution (1913) and World War I (1914-15). Reed organized the Communist Labor Party in the United States in 1919. He died in Russia and is buried in the Kremlin.