Romantic revolutionary : a biography of John Reed / Robert A. Rosenstone.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [411]-430) and index.

1. The legend -- 2. Portland -- 3. Morristown -- 4. Harvard -- 5. Europe -- 6. Manhattan -- 7. Greenwich Village -- 8. Paterson -- 9. 23 Fifth Avenue -- 10. Mexico -- 11. Ludlow -- 12. Western Front -- 13. New York -- 14. Eastern Europe -- 15. Provincetown -- 16. Croton -- 17. Petrograd -- 18. Christiania -- 19. America -- 20. Chicago -- 21. Russia -- 22. Ever-victorious.

"He was a legend even to his contemporaries -- John Reed, author of "Ten Days That Shook the World," the golden boy, the Galahad of American Bohemia and American radicalism in the innocent, hopeful days before World War I. Born to an established Oregon family, he was scarcely our of Harvard when he embarked on the rebellious, instinctive course that led him to befriend the Wobblies, to write for the "Masses," to ride with Pancho Villa, and that brought him ultimately to Russia as the Bolsheviks were seizing power, to the writing of his famous book, and to his death, at thirty-three, in Moscow, where he is buried at the base of the Kremlin Wall, a Hero of the Revolution. Now Robert Rosenstone has penetrated the myth of Jack Reed to reveal the troubled, self-contradictory impulses that moved him to enact his childhood dreams of heroes and great deeds, to embrace the divergent causes of both artists and revolutionaries, to live a life of continuous experimentation, rebelling against established orders, restricted consciousnesses and unquestioned values. "Romantic Revolutionary" recaptures in vivid, personal terms Reed's world ... and its people: his friendships with Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann, Emma Goldman, Floyd Dell, Eugene O'Neill, Max Eastman; his intense, often strained love affairs with Mabel Dodge Luhan, Louise Bryant and others; his direct participation in the struggles of Big Bill Hayward, Pancho Villa, Lenin and Trotsky...." - from the dust jacket