Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

American journalist John Silas Reed, a correspondent of World War I, recounted an experience in Petrograd during the revolution of October 1917 in Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) and, after returning to the United States, cofounded the Communist labor party in 1919; people buried his body in the Kremlin, the citadel, housing the offices of the Russian government and formerly those of the Soviet government, in Moscow.

This poet and Communist activist first gained prominence as a war correspondent during the Mexican revolution for Metropolitan magazine and during World War I for the magazine The Masses. People best know his coverage.

Reed supported the Soviet takeover of Russia and even briefly took up arms to join the Red guards in 1918. He expected a similar Communist revolution in the United States with the short-lived organization.

He died in Moscow of spotted typhus. At the time of his death, he perhaps soured on the Soviet leadership, but the Soviet Union gave him burial of a hero, one of only three Americans at the Kremlin wall necropolis.