The Man Who Told All

How the naked grief of John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud inaugurated an American genre

- By Deborah Cohen. Photograph by Irving Penn

The book was probably unpublishable. About that fact both the author and his longtime editor agreed. But the author was determined, and he had on his side a brilliant publishing record. For more than a decade, starting in 1936 with his Inside Europe, the reporter John Gunther had been a fixture on the best-seller lists. From the mid-1930s through the 1950s, no one, save the romance novelist Daphne du Maurier, had produced more American best sellers than Gunther.

Gunther's unpublishable book was a memoir: an account of the death, in 1947, of his 17-year-old son, Johnny, from a brain tumor. Gunther had started writing while the experience of Johnny's illness was still raw, finishing the book in a few weeks, six months after his son's death. He'd set out with the idea of a privately circulated memoir, the sort of volume of remembrances printed in a few hundred copies that parents of soldiers killed in action sent to friends and relations. But as he finished the manuscript, he began to think it should be published for a wider audience.

Surely the book was too personal, Gunther's publisher, Harper & Brothers, objected. Who would want to read such a dismal book about a complete stranger? And wasn't it indecent to broadcast an intimate story of suffering in public? But Gunther prevailed. He and his editor came to an agreement: The book would be published with a notice on the jacket that neither Harper & Brothers nor Gunther himself would take any profits from its sale; all the proceeds from the book would go to fund cancer research for children. And with that disclaimer, a title borrowed from a John Donne poem, and a dignified buff jacket ornamented only by a small drawing of a dove, Harper & Brothers published Gunther's Death Be Not Proud in February 1949 in a modest print run.