Frances (Fineman) Gunther, 1897-1964

Frances (Fineman) Gunther, journalist and writer, was born in 1897 in New York, the younger of two children of Sonia (Paul) and Dennis Fineman, both Russian Jews. FFG maintained a friendship with her brother, Bernard, into adulthood. FFG attended Barnard College, with a year (1919 1920) at Radcliffe, and was graduated in 1921. She began psychoanalysis in New York in 1923, continuing in Vienna and other places where she lived over the next four decades. During the 1920s, she went to the Soviet Union, and studied Russian theatre.

FFG met John Gunther in 1925, and they were married in 1927. JG became well known for a series of books, including Inside Europe (1936) and Inside Asia (1939). They had two children, both of whom died in childhood: Judy in 1929, before her first birthday, and John, Jr. (Johnny) at 17, in 1947. Johnny's fifteen month struggle with a brain tumor was the subject of JG's Death Be Not Proud, of which FFG wrote the last chapter.

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