In 1960, my mother read it in her tenth-grade civics class in Louisville, Kentucky. For decades, Death Be Not Proud was required reading in many American high schools. It had been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Hindi, and Portuguese, among other languages. By the time that I first read the book, in 1981, it was a mass-market paperback that had sold hundreds of thousands of copies-a publishing success well beyond anything that either Gunther or Harper & Brothers could have imagined. 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.
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. 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. Surely the book was too personal, Gunther’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, objected. But as he finished the manuscript, he began to think it should be published for a wider audience. 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. 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. 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. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.