John Reed's biography (by Albert Rhys Williams)

Albert Rhys Williams was born in the United States in 1883 and died in 1962.
He arrived in Russia as a journalist in 1916 and stayed in the country to see the end of World War I and the historic days of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Williams was one of the first foreigners to join the Red Army. Later he became one of the organizers of the International Battalion of the Red Army. From that time Albert Rhys Williams was always a true friend of the Soviet Union.
For many people all over the world, and particularly for those in the English-speaking countries, "Ten Days that Shook the World" by John Reed, was the first introduction to the Great October Socialist Revolution. The book was one of the first to tell the people in the West the truth about the Russian Revolution.

Born in Portland, Oregon, on October 22, 1887, John Reed took after his father, who was a fighter by nature.
After leaving school, John Reed went to Harvard, America's most famous university.
Having taken his degree, John Reed entered the wide world outside the walls of the university. Soon he was in great demand as a writer of articles, stories, poems and plays, which were published in all the leading journals and magazines. As a journalist he travelled widely over the United States, and the experience he gained during these trips brought him closer to the workers. He got to know their life very well and took an active part in their struggle.
In the town of Paterson, a strike of textile workers turned into a revolutionary storm — and John Reed was among the strikers. In the State of Colorado, an agricultural area of the United States, he joined the Negroes who rose against racial discrimination.
When World War I broke out, John Reed travelled to the battle fronts in France, Germany, Turkey, Italy and in Russia, too, and everywhere he went, he continued fighting for justice in spite of the danger to himself.
From the battlefields of Europe he returned to the United States not with fine words about the cruelty at the front, but exposing the war as a whole, a war unleashed by the imperialists to increase their profits at the expense of the people. For the anti-war information that he spread he was brought before a New York court.
In court he said openly that it was his duty to fight for the revolution.
His speech exposing the war impressed everybody. John Reed was found not guilty.
In the summer of 1917, John Reed went to Russia, and during his stay there he realized that the victory of the Russian working class was approaching. When the fight began, John Reed was there with the revolutionary workers of Petro-grad in the Smolny, attending meetings at which Lenin spoke.
Having returned to the United States in 1918, he organized the Communist Workers' Party, which later became the Communist Party of the USA. He was arrested many times for his revolutionary work.
John Reed was a revolutionary long before he saw the events in the Palace Square in Petrograd, but his experiences there made him a scientific revolutionary. He studied the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, which gave him an understanding of historical events leading to revolution. The Russian Revolution showed him the way forward, to the organization of the Communist Party in the United States, and to his work in the Communist International.
In 1920 he travelled to the Caucasus, where he took part in the Congress of the Workers of the East. There he caught typhus and died on October 17, 1920. He was buried near the Kremlin Wall with other fighters for the revolution.