Biography
John Silas Reed was an American journalist and revolutionary, best known for his eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. A contributor to The Masses, he was federally indicted with Max Eastman and the magazine’s staff in November 1917 for conspiring to obstruct military recruitment. Two trials in 1918 ended in hung juries, and the charges were dismissed. Reed helped found the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. While facing a new sedition prosecution, he left the United States under a forged passport in October 1919 and traveled through Scandinavia and Finland to Soviet Russia. He remained outside the United States for the rest of his life, including a period of imprisonment in Finland while attempting to return. Reed died of typhus in Moscow on October 17, 1920, at age 32, and was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
