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"Inside Fodor." Soon afterward, the cocky young reporter put in for the Chicago Daily News's foreign service, which then boasted such prestigious byliners as Paul Scott Mowrer, his brother Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Hal O'Flaherty, Junius Wood. Turned down, Gunther quit his $55-a-week job and hopped a ship for England, where he was i) promptly hired by the News's London bureau, 2) fired when Chicago spotted his byline. After six months with the United Press in London, he was taken on by the News's Paris bureau and launched into an invaluable round as continental swingman, filling in for vacationing correspondents all over Europe.
In 1930 Correspondent Gunther won an assignment to Vienna—and a seat in the world's most exciting press box. As Europe sputtered toward war, Vienna became a vantage point from which U.S. correspondents shaped a new tradition of alert, informed foreign reporting that gave readers back home the world's best European coverage. From such resident and visiting firemen as the New York Evening Post's Dorothy Thompson. I.N.S.'s late H. R. Knickerbocker (who once interviewed Stalin's mother), the Chicago Tribune's William (Berlin Diary) Shirer, and Author Sheean, Correspondent Gunther busily soaked up lore and legends that never made the news stories. Gunther's most valuable mentor: the New York Evening Post's M. W. (''Mike") Fodor, dean of Balkan correspondents, who helped the young Chicagoan so generously that fellow newsmen later dubbed Inside Europe "Inside Fodor."
For all his brain-picking, Gunther was so likable and professionally esteemed that he was elected first president of Vienna's Anglo-American Press Association in 1931. With his small, assertive first wife Frances, Gunther was as famed even then for doughty partying as for hard work. In his spare time, fast-working Gunther wrote dozens of political pieces for magazines ranging from Foreign Affairs to Woman's Home Companion.
Footnote to History. The germ of Inside Europe was planted in Gunther by Harper's Editor Cass Canfield after IQSI'S Washington Merry-Go-Round, by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, created a demand for uninhibited political reporting. In 1934 Gunther reluctantly agreed that he might do a book on Europe's political leaders if Harper's put up what he considered an "impossible" $5,000 advance. He got the advance, slaved over the book at night while working in the Daily News's London bureau. With help, as he acknowledged, from "colleagues in 20 countries," he did the job in six months. Given its final title by Gunther at the last moment, Inside Europe became an overnight hit. In five revised editions it has sold some 650,000 copies worldwide, gone into 70 printings in the U.S., where it still sells 1,200 copies a year.
With less than $2,500 in savings, Gunther left the Chicago Daily News for the third and last time. He has not worked on a newspaper since. But in 1943 Gunther served the whole U.S. press as pool reporter at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Allied general headquarters during the Sicilian invasion, later published a Sicilian invasion diary, D Day (dedicated to Actress Miriam Hopkins "with love").