Frances Gunther (1897–1964)

Frances Gunther, née Fineman, was born in New York to Russian-Jewish emigrants. She attended Barnard College, spent a year at Radcliffe, and graduated in 1921. In the 1920s, she travelled to the Soviet Union and studied Russian theater. In 1927, she married John Gunther, a journalist and author with whom she had two children. The couple lived and worked in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna. She and her husband were associated as journalists during the years 1925 to 1936, she as a foreign correspondent for the London News Chronicle, he as a reporter for the News Chronicle and the Chicago Daily News. She covered the rise of Nazism and other major events of that era. In 1937-1938, the Gunthers traveled throughout the Middle East and Asia, meeting notables such as Weizmann, Gandhi, and Chiang Kai-shek. On this trip, she established a longtime friendship with Jawarharlal Nehru. During World War II, she wrote articles and made speeches advocating Indian independence. Her speeches were collected in the book, Revolution in India (1944). In 1948-1949, she attended lectures by Karen Horney and others at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and spoke on psychoanalysis and the news world before the Association of the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. In the late 1940s, she joined other Zionists in supporting the establishment of the new State of Israel. She lived in Israel, took Hebrew lessons and, began a long range study of Arab-Israeli relations. In 1960, she returned to New York and took courses in religion, linguistics, and sociology at Columbia University. The Gunthers first child, Judy, had died as an infant in 1929. Their second child, John Gunther, Jr., known as Johnny, became ill from a brain tumor and died at age 17, in 1947. He was the subject of John Gunther's most famous book, Death Be Not Proud, for which Frances Gunther wrote the last chapter.