Gunther's non-fiction works generally share the same title format: Inside Europe (1936), Inside Asia (1939), Inside USA (1947), and several others of that type. They were very popular in their day, and the consistent titles were memorable enough that a biography of Gunther was released in 1992 entitled Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. In addition to his popular Inside series, Gunther wrote two novels, Bright Nemesis and The Troubled Midnight, as well as Eisenhower, a biography of the famous general released in 1952, the year Eisenhower became President.
The book for which Gunther is best remembered today, however, does not deal with the intrigues of politics: Death Be Not Proud is the simple story of his son, Johnny Gunther, who died of a brain tumor at the age of 17. In the book, John Gunther relates in honest detail the struggles that he and his wife went through in attempting to save Johnny's life--the many treatments pursued (everything from radical surgery to strictly controlled diet), the ups and downs of apparent remission and eventual relapse, and the strain it placed on all three of them. Johnny was an evidently remarkable young man--he corresponded intelligently with Albert Einstein about physics--and the heartbreak of his death is told so movingly by Gunther that the book became a best-seller, and has subsequently been filmed. It is a staple of many high-school curricula to this day.