John Reed, a Harvard graduate from a rather middle-class background in Portland, Oregon, had a splendidly turbulent life as a labour activist associated with the IWW, a war correspondent in the Mexican Revolution and World War I, and most of all as a first-hand observer of the Russian revolution (his account in Ten days that shook the world remains his best-known work). Frequently shot at or arrested, constantly smuggling himself over frontiers, engaged in romances with several well-known revolutionaries, etc., etc. ... he was obviously very unlucky to meet his end so prosaically with a typhus infection in Moscow in 1920, but he was one of the very few Americans to get a grave of honour in the Kremlin.

This collection, originally issued by Seven Seas in the early sixties and republished in slightly expanded form by City Lights in 1975, brings together some of his early short fiction and a few shorter journalistic pieces from Mexico and Russia not previously published in book form. Ferlinghetti added his autobiographical essay "Almost thirty" (1917) to round out the collection.

I was most struck by the New York stories in the first part of the book, mostly written around 1910-1912, and obviously originating as lightly fictionalised versions of conversations he had with real prostitutes and homeless people on the streets of Greenwich Village. The slightly arch, Edwardian style is oddly reminiscent of very early P G Wodehouse, but the content is anything but "literary" in that sense: he is full of respect for the people he is talking to and lets them tell their own stories without a trace of patronising superiority, and without any squeamishness about telling it like it is. Nobody who read these stories would have had any doubts about what these women were doing to earn money on the streets (which is possibly why they remained largely unpublished for so long).

Elsewhere, Reed uses the same technique of letting his characters tell their stories in their own words rather more ironically: in "Mac - American" he lets an American in Mexico rant away over a series of drinks with no comment from the narrator, gradually revealing himself as more and more of a racist, up to the point where Mac tells us about the orgasmic pleasure of joining a lynch-mob. And in the back-to-back stories "John Bull in America", two British men on their way home to enlist in the Great War are left floundering, exposing the absence of any sane reason for wanting to fight.

The more directly political pieces seemed rather less original in form than these character-studies, but I was left with the strong feeling that I would like to read more from Reed. Which is always a good note on which to finish a book! ( )