ABSTRACT
Though he is only in his middle twenties and but five years out of Harvard, there is a legend of John Reed. Even as an undergraduate he betrayed what many people believe to be the central passion of his life, an inordinate desire to be arrested. He spent a brief vacation in Europe and experimented with the jails of England, France, and Spain. He made speeches to Italian syndicalists and appointed himself to carry the greetings of the American labor movement to their foreign comrades. By temperament he is not a professional writer or reporter. He is a person who enjoys himself. Revolution, literature, poetry, they are only things which hold him at times, incidents merely of his living. He is one of those people who treat as serious possibilities such stock fantasies as shipping before the mast, rescuing women, hunting lions, or trying to fly around the world in an aeroplane.
