In the spring of 1946, Gunther was busy writing the book he’d planned about democracy, Inside U.S.A., when 16-year-old Johnny was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The prognosis was grim; radiation therapy began immediately, and the doctors’ bills piled up. John cried so much that Frances feared he’d collapse. But he had to work. He’d barely made a dent in the book’s projected 50-plus chapters and was running out of money. While Johnny was undergoing treatment, John visited him at noon and in the evenings—Frances was there all afternoon—and returned to his office, writing until 1 or 2 a.m. every night. Thank God for the end of daylight savings time, he noted in his diary: It gave him an extra hour to work. The Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen Inside U.S.A. as its selection for June 1947, a guarantee of big sales. To make that deadline, Harper & Brothers was typesetting the book a chapter at a time, as quickly as Gunther finished them.
He met his deadline, and Inside U.S.A. hit the market with the largest initial print run in the history of American publishing, a half-million copies. Johnny died a month later, on June 30, 1947. At the end of the summer, Gunther put his son’s papers in order: his schoolwork, his diaries, the letters he and Frances had exchanged with Johnny when they were away for eight months in 1937–38 reporting from Asia and, later, when he left for boarding school. John talked with Frances about writing a “Johnny book.” He arranged the hundreds of condolence letters they’d gotten—brief, embarrassed missives from friends and acquaintances, people never at a loss for what to say, acknowledging that the Gunthers’ grief was “beyond words.” Just after Christmas, he started writing.
The book, Gunther decided, would have three parts: his own narrative, then Johnny’s lightly edited letters and diaries, and an afterword by Frances. Gunther had been jotting down notes and phrases all along on the colored slips of paper he always kept nearby. An old reporter’s habit: He’d recorded fragments of conversations, the offhand comments doctors and nurses made, Johnny’s wry observations. His subject wouldn’t be Johnny’s life—the usual territory of the “In Memoriam” volume—but how he’d endured sickness. He was writing a blow-by-blow account of “what happened to Johnny’s brain.”
It was, Gunther recognized, an “unconventional” approach. The standard mid-century source on American autobiography counts only 13 titles dealing with illness out of the more than 6,000 memoirs published before 1945. None of those is a chronicle of cancer, the subject of most illness memoirs today. After the Second World War, scientific advances in cancer therapeutics were just starting to extend survival rates, and with the new medical possibilities came a new narrative form, which derived its suspense from the twists and turns of treatment.