INSIDE AFRICA.

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Gunther started to plan Inside U.S.A. as early as 1936, when his idea was to create a two-part book, with the first part focused on the power structure of Washington, DC, and the second part a "snapshot" of the entirety of the United States. [3] He did not begin serious work on the project until 1944, by which time his plan was to write about America from the perspective of an outsider. After living outside the country for more than a decade, he considered himself to have become an outsider. He joked that he was "writing for the man from Mars" and that he also was from Mars. [4] [5] In November 1944, after studying U.S. statistics, signing a book contract with a publisher and a second contract under which Reader's Digest would publish excerpts while he was still writing, [6] and sending a list of questions and interview requests to the governor of every state, [7] [8] he set out to tour the country and interview its prominent citizens, including business leaders, politicians, writers, and academics. [4] The fact that so many of the taboo-shredding American memoirists had lived in Europe wasn’t a coincidence. They had seen up close the battle among fascism, communism, and democracy playing out after the First World War. Inevitably, they took sides and came to rethink their place in the world. This doesn’t accord with the stereotype of the Lost Generation, its members drinking away their anomie in Parisian cafés. But as Brooke Blower noted in her insightful Becoming Americans in Paris (2011), that is because our conception of the Lost Generation is too limited. They weren’t simply running away; they were, as John Dos Passos put it, running toward “the whole wide world.” When they start dancing," continues Kittler, "the Watusi discard their usual reserve and become frenzied.... Twisting, bending, squirming, they leap into the air, breaking high-jump records with-out missing a beat. They carry spears, and when one jumper soars especially high the others throw down their spears in defeat. But the dance goes on. Ankle bracelets heavy with bells match the earth-trembling thunder of twenty royal drummers. First ten men dance, then fifty, then two hundred, their speed increasing with their number as they fly through intricate routines with thrilling precision and flair." 5

For more than 30 years, Mr. Gunther was looked to by stay‐at‐home public for his live ly, informed descriptions of the world at large. He traveled more miles, crossed more bor ders, interviewed more states men, wrote more books and sold more copies than any other single journalist of his time. At least 15 of his books were translated into more than 90 languages. It was, however, when the Gunthers reached the Union of South Africa that they faced the most violent and difficult interracial situation on the whole continent. The present government is “grounded in part at least on three of the most unpleasant, of human characteristics — fear, bigotry, and intolerance. It is based without qualification on the principle of unmitigated white supremacy (i.e., suppression of four-fifths of the people of the country) and it is in some respects the ugliest government I have ever encountered in the free world.” French North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, is alive with nationalistic agitation and occasional violence. France has done many notable things in North Africa and has followed a policy of assimilation of the natives into French culture, and in the case of Algeria of political equality with citizens of Metropolitan France. The case of French North Africa is not yet desperate. Morocco at least is far from ready for independence, but whether or not the French can persuade the Arabs and the Berbers in this vast territory to seek their future under French guidance and coöperation remains to be seen. Egypt of course is a case of its own, being an independent country, as is Ethiopia. It is when one gets to British East Africa, including Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, that the racial tensions become acute. Kenya is the most disturbed of these countries because there the white settlers really came to stay and look over the best of the farming country. Their continued tenure there is extremely problematical. I suppose that I write, basi cally, for myself, to satisfy my own sometimes peculiar curiosi ties. In a way, my work has been an exercise in self‐educa tion at the expense of the pub lic. But I think I'm a pretty av erage person, and I have worked from the assumption that if something interests me it will probably interest the cas ual reader too. I have tried not to underestimate the reader's intelligence nor, at the same time, overestimate what he knows.”Peirce, Neal R. (1973). The Great Plains States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Nine Great Plains States. W. W. Norton & Company. pp.11–13. ISBN 9780393053494.

The Gunthers had two children: Judy, who died in 1929 before the age of 1, and John Jr. (Johnny), who was born in 1929 and died in 1947 of a brain tumor. The Gunthers divorced in 1944. [3] The books that made Gunther famous in his time were the "Inside" series of continental surveys. For each book, Gunther traveled extensively through the area the book covered, interviewed political, social, and business leaders; talked with average people; reviewed area statistics; and then wrote a lengthy overview of what he had learned and how he interpreted it.At Agadir in Morocco, reports Peter Kolosimo, the French captain Lafanechere "discovered a complete arsenal of hunting weapons including five hundred double-edged axes weighing seventeen and a half pounds, i.e. twenty times as heavy as would be convenient for modern man. Apart from the question of weight, to handle the axe at all one would need to have hands of a size appropriate to a giant with a stature of at least 13 feet." 2 (See Australian Giants; La Tene; South American Giants) Vienna's Cafe Louvre in the 1920s & 1930s: Meeting Place for Foreign Correspondents | Coffeehouse | Nazi Germany". Scribd. Gunther attended the University of Chicago, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Ph.B. degree in 1922. Without waiting to receive his diploma, he embarked on a cattle boat bound for Europe. On his return he took a reporting job with the Chicago Daily News but relinquished it when the management declined to assign him as a European correspondent. He made his way to London and managed to gain a position on the Daily News London bureau, where he worked from 1924 to 1936. For the next nine years he covered various European capitals, the Balkan region, and the Middle East. Gunther’s teenage readers recognized Death Be Not Proud ’s redemptive message. It was a book about an individual whose selflessness was his most salient feature. As an eighth-grade boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, put it, “His fight for life was not only for his mortal body but the lives of millions of people.” But Johnny’s wasn’t the self-sacrifice of a Christ figure or the hardened courage of a soldier. It was something altogether more recognizable to young readers. Students put themselves in the shoes of Johnny, Frances, or John. Teachers encouraged that sympathetic identification by asking their pupils to write essays from the perspective of one of the “characters” in the book.