John Gunther (August 30, 1901 - May 29, 1970) was an American author whose success came primarily in the 1940s and 1950s with a series of non-fiction books about the political situations in various corners of the world, though he is today most frequently remembered for the memoir Death Be Not Proud, Gunther's true story about the death of his teenage son (Johnny Gunther) from a brain tumor.
Gunther's non-fiction works generally share the same title format: Inside Europe (1936), Inside Asia (1939), Inside USA (1947), and several others of that type. They were very popular in their day, and the consistent titles were memorable enough that a biography of Gunther was released in 1992 entitled Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. In addition to his popular Inside series, Gunther wrote two novels, Bright Nemesis and The Troubled Midnight, as well as Eisenhower, a biography of the famous general released in 1952, the year Eisenhower became President.
The book for which Gunther is best remembered today, however, does not deal with the intrigues of politics: Death Be Not Proud is the simple story of his son, Johnny Gunther, who died of a brain tumor at the age of 17. In the book, John Gunther relates in honest detail the struggles that he and his wife went through in attempting to save Johnny's life--the many treatments pursued (everything from radical surgery to strictly controlled diet), the ups and downs of apparent remission and eventual relapse, and the strain it placed on all three of them. Johnny was an evidently remarkable young man--he corresponded intelligently with Albert Einstein about physics--and the heartbreak of his death is told so movingly by Gunther that the book became a best-seller, and has subsequently been filmed. It is a staple of many high-school curricula to this day.
