born Oct. 22, 1887, Portland, Ore., U.S.
died Oct. 19, 1920, Moscow, Russia
U.S. journalist.
He attended Harvard University and began writing for the radical socialist journal The Masses in 1913. He covered the revolutionary fighting in Mexico (1914) and was frequently arrested for leading labour strikes. A war correspondent during World War I, he became a close friend of Vladimir Lenin and witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917 , described in his book Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). He became head of the U.S. Communist Labor Party; indicted for sedition, he escaped to the Soviet Union, where he died of typhus and was buried beside the Kremlin wall.