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.
This story is from the April 2022 edition of The Atlantic.
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This story is from the April 2022 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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