1887-192O Reporter

Busy at Harvard, and After.

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1887, John Reed entered Harvard University with the illustrious class of 1910 that included Walter Lippmann and T. S. Eliot. He studied writing and found time to write for the Lampoon, help edit the literary Monthly, captain the water polo team, sing in the glee club, and write lyrics for Hasty Pudding theatricals. After graduation he traveled to Europe, settled among a bohemian circle in New York's Greenwich Village, and wrote for the muckraking American Magazine and for the radical Masses after its founding in 1911.

The Stories of Workers and Peasants.

Reed wrote with great passion about domestic social problems. His moving account of a strike by twenty thousand textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey, attracted widespread attention. In 1913 Metropolitan magazine sent him to Mexico to cover Pancho Villa's peasant revolution against the dictator Victoriano...