Death Be Not Proud (18 page)

Unbeliever’s Prayer

Almighty God

forgive me for my agnosticism;

For I shall try to keep it gentle,

not cynical, nor a bad influence.

And O!

if Thou art truly in the heavens,

accept my gratitude

for all Thy gifts

and I shall try

to fight the good fight. Amen.

— J
OHN
G
UNTHER
, J
R
.
     
M
AY
, 1946

FINIS

Death Be Not Proud

1949

John Gunther’s memoir of his son and the story of his death
from a malignant brain tumor received universally favorable reviews when it was published by Harper & Row in February 1949. The anonymous reviewer for
Time
magazine set the tone by praising Gunther for his emotional restraint, simplicity of style, and personal generosity:

“Such a book could easily have become an understandable but embarrassing statement of grief, or a father’s equally embarrassing eulogy. This one is neither. . . . Without fuss, in simple, almost conversational style, he expresses the love and comrade-ship he felt for his son, gives a step-by-step account of cancer’s inexorable victory. In so doing, Gunther arouses in the reader an almost deliberate passion to help find the dark enemy and destroy it.”

Walter Duranty, in the
New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review,
singled out Gunther as a “first-class reporter” who used his sharp eye and critical intelligence in reconstructing the “blow-by-blow story of the attack and victory of [cancer] in its most malignant form.” Duranty cautioned that readers who “shiver and avert their eyes from the word and thought of cancer” might find the book hard to take, but he felt that ultimately Johnny’s fight for his life was uplifting, even inspiring—a tale whose keynote was “not horror and suffering but bravery, strength, and cheerfulness.”
Death Be Not Proud,
Duranty concludes, is “a triumphant picture of human heroism in which the hero is truly heroic. T o read it is to grasp the meaning of man’s power to defy Death’s hurt, to be filled with confidence and emptied of despair.”

Several reviewers noted the universality of Gunther’s book, particularly its deep and abiding meaning for all parents who have watched their children suffer. As Pamela Taylor wrote in her sensitive review in the
Saturday Review of Literature:
“Most parents have had some of the experiences which are recounted in this book: the anxious, wingless hours in the hospital waiting room while operations are in progress, the unendurable courage of suffering children, so much harder to bear than misbehavior. To all of them, in fact to anyone, this record, set down with the vivid pen of an acute and trained observer, is hard to read; and it is much, much harder to forget.”

R. L. Duffus, reviewing the book in the
New York Times,
also dwelled on how painful the book was to read, “for Mr. Gunther spares neither himself nor his reader.” But Duffus felt that ultimately the pain was worth enduring because of the importance of Gunther’s message: “I f we can stand literal descriptions of battles, we ought to be able to stand this. . . . If courage is an antidote to pain and grief, the disease and the cure are both in this book. Those who can endure this strong medicine will be the stronger if they read this book.”

Over the years,
Death Be Not Proud
has proven to be especially important to young people, as well as to all families who have faced the tragedy of terminal disease. Since its first publication, it has never been out of print.

About the Author

John Gunther was one of the best known and most admired
journalists of his day. His trademark as a writer was to amass a dazzling array of information about people and places and present his knowledge of the world in a highly readable, entertaining form. His
Inside
series of books, starting with
Inside Europe
in 1936, were immensely popular profiles of major regions and countries. One critic noted that it was Gunther’s special gift to “unite the best qualities of the newspaperman and the historian.” It was a gift that readers responded to enthusiastically: the
Inside
books sold 3.5 mil-lion copies over a period of thirty years.

John Gunther was born on August 30, 1901, on the north side of Chicago, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a father who, as he later put it, “dabbled in real estate and excelled at drinking.” Convinced as a teenager that a literary career awaited him, Gunther rushed off to Europe in 1922 as soon as he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. His idea was to join the “Lost Generation” of American expatriate writers, but he returned to the United States within a couple of months, where he landed a fifteen-dollar-a-week job as a cub reporter for the
Chicago Daily News.
He hoped that the paper would assign him to Europe as part of its foreign staff, but when the editors refused to send so inexperienced a reporter, Gunther promptly quit and left again for Europe on his own, determined this time to make his way as a foreign correspondent. It was a daring move, but it proved to be the making of his career. In the end the
Daily News
dad
hire him as a “swing man,” taking charge of different bureaus while the senior correspondents were away. Gunther was with the
Daily News
for twelve years, and at various times was in charge of the bureaus in London, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, and Paris. He also worked for the National Broadcasting Company, the North American Newspaper Alliance,
Look
magazine, and the
New York Herald Tribune.

The late 1920s and 1930s were, in Gunther’s words, “the bubbling, blazing days of American foreign correspondents in Europe,” and Gunther worked alongside the greatest names in the field—Dorothy Thompson, William Shirer, Vincent Sheean. “We were scavengers, buzzards,” Gunther later recalled, “out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.” With Europe convulsed by the economic depression and political turmoil that preceded World War II, Gunther interviewed kings and premiers, anarchists and revolutionaries. His negative profile of Hitler secured him a place on the Gestapo’s death list. Lloyd George, Jawaharlal Nehru, Emperor Hirohito, Charles de Gaulle, Eamon de Valera, Leon Trotsky, and Douglas MacArthur were among the many other subjects Gunther profiled.

During this period, Gunther also published four novels:
The Red Pavilion
(Harper & Brothers, 1926),
Eden for One
(Harper & Brothers, 1927),
The Golden Fleece
(Harper & Brothers, 1929), and
The Bright Nemesis
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1932) but none of them met with the literary success he had hoped for. Then, in the mid-1930s, Cass Canfield, an editor at Harper & Brothers, approached Gunther with the idea of writing a book of informal, freewheeling political pieces on the European scene. Hoping to scuttle the project, Gunther demanded what he considered the outrageous sum of $5,000, which Canfield agreed to. This was the origin o f
Inside Europe,
an instant bestseller which went through five updates and eventually sold over a million copies.

Gunther followed up the first volume with
Inside Latin America
(1941),
Inside U.SA.
(1947),
Inside Africa
(1955),
Inside Russia Today
(1958), and
Inside South America
(1967). Each book was the product of painstaking research and exhausting travel. The
New York Times
reported that for
Inside U.SA.,
Gunther spent thirteen months on the road, visiting three hundred towns and cities. As
Times
reporter Albrin Krebs wrote in Gunther’s obituary, “He traveled more miles, crossed more borders, interviewed more statesmen, wrote more books and sold more copies than any other single journalist of his time.”

Hoping to capitalize on his fame as a journalist, Gunther published a fifth novel in 1945,
The Troubled Midnight,
but like his earlier novels, this book failed to achieve the success accorded his nonfiction books. His subsequent novels included
The Lost City
(1964) and
The Indian Sign
(1970).

Gunther was by all accounts a warm, exuberant, outgoing man with a knack for friendship and a taste for luxury. He loved expensive clothes and fine food, and once joked that he was perennially broke despite his immense success because “I’ve eaten every book by the time it’s published.” Guests at his frequent cocktail parties included Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Marlene Dietrich.

Gunther, the public figure, was a bon vivant and a modest celebrity, but in private life he suffered disappointment and tragedy. He and Frances Fineman, whom he married in 1927, had a daughter who died four months after her birth in 1929. The Gunthers divorced in 1944. In 1947 their beloved son Johnny died after a long, heartbreaking fight with brain cancer. Gunther wrote his classic memoir
Death Be Not Proud
(published in 1949 by Harper & Row) to commemorate the courage and spirit of this extraordinary boy. All of the proceeds from this book were and have since been devoted to cancer research for children. Gunther married again in 1948, and he and his second wife, Jane Perry Vandercook, adopted a son.

John Gunther died on May 29, 1970. He once told a reporter that he wrote basically for himself, “to satisfy my own sometimes peculiar curiosities. In a way, my work has been an exercise in self-education, at the expense of the public.” It was an expenditure the public gladly made, both for the
Inside
books and for
Death Be Not Proud,
which has proven to be Gunther’s most enduring literary achievement.

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Credits

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photograph © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Copyright

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1949 by Harper & Row, Publishers.

DEATH BE NOT PROUD
. Copyright © 1949 by John Gunther. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

First
PERENNIAL LIBRARY
edition published 1965. Reset 1989.

First Perennial Classics edition published 1998.

First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2007.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gunther, John, 1901-1970.

   
Death be not proud / John J. Gunther.—1st Perennial Classics ed.

          
p.   cm.

      
ISBN: 978-0-06-123097-4

      
ISBN-10: 0-06-123097-9

      
EPUB Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780062284495

      
1. Gunther, John, 1929-1947—Health. 2. Brain—Tumors—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Tumors in adolescence—Patients—United States—Biography. I. Title.

   
RC280.B7G86   1999

   
362.1 ’9699481 ’092—dc21

   
[b]

98-8377

11  
RRD
  10   9   8   7