INSIDE AFRICA.

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Hamilton, John M. (2009) Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. Louisiana State University Press. New York has a birth every five minutes, and a marriage every seven. It has ‘more Norwegian-born citizens than Tromsoe and Narvik put together,’ and only one railroad, the New York Central, has the perpetual right to enter it by land. It has 22,000 soda fountains, and 112 tons of soot fall per square mile every month, which is why your face is dirty.” Nebraska. “Some early villages were so small that, for a time, each had only one church; Catholics and Protestants worshiped in the same room, with half the pews facing an altar at one end, half a pulpit at the other.”

a b c d e f Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. (April 1997). "A Man from Mars". The Atlantic Monthly. 279 (4): 113–118. One of the things that makes it so alive is Gunther’s curiosity about his own country; he knew Latin America, he knew Europe, he knew Asia, but he didn’t know America. “The United States, like a cobra, lay before me, seductive, terrifying and immense,” he wrote. “‘Inside U.S.A.’ was the hardest task I ever undertook.” He was yet again an outsider, looking in. “Not only was I trying to write for the man from Mars; I was one.” I was ravenously interested in human beings,” he said. “I never really got a big scoop in my life, and the little ones got were just plain accidents.I wasn't one of those reporters who managed to be on the scene when things happened. I was generally somewhere else. Matter of fact, I never really gave a damn about spot news. The idea of beating The Asso ciated Press by six minutes bored me silly.”Roughly one million Negroes entered the armed services [during the war]. Many were treated decently and democratically by whites for the first time in their lives; the consequent fermentations have been explosive. … One famous remark is that of the Negro soldier returning across the Pacific from Okinawa. ‘ Our fight for freedom,’ he said, ‘begins when we get to San Francisco.’”

a b Cuthbertson, Ken (October 2002). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. p.239. ISBN 9780759232884.

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The book is divided into 52 chapters, organized by geography. Its geographical structure begins in California, continues through other western states to the Great Plains and Midwest, then east to the Northeast and Southeast, then west to Texas and Oklahoma, and finally to the "new states" of New Mexico and Arizona. Factual information about topics like geography, population, and history is commingled with highly opinionated statements ( Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called some of these opinions "flip judgments" [5]) about United States places and people. According to Gunther, Southern California was "the California of petroleum, crazy religious cults, the citrus industry, ... the weirdest architecture in the United States, ... and devotees of funny money", and a place where "climate is worshipped as a god". [13] Gunther described Phoenix, Arizona as the "cleanest city" he saw and Indianapolis as "the dirtiest." [14] He called Knoxville, Tennessee, "an extremely puritanical town" and the "ugliest city" he saw. [15] (The remarks about Indianapolis' dirtiness and Knoxville's ugliness spurred both of these cities to start beautification efforts and led Knoxville to establish the annual Dogwood Arts Festival. [5] [15]) He said that the "best beef" he ate was in Montana, the "best single meal" in Milwaukee, and the "best ice cream" in Richmond, Virginia. [14] In reply to his asking a group of Philadelphians “what, if anything, descendants of Benjamin Franklin might be doing in Philadelphia these days,” “one answer was (I report it literally): ‘We consider Mr. Franklin to have been of a somewhat shady family.’” The making of the “Inside” books was phenomenally hard work, and Mr. Gunther did al most all of it himself. He worked briefly in the city as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, but he soon moved to Europe to be a correspondent with the Daily News London bureau, where he covered Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East.

John Gunther, (born Aug. 30, 1901, Chicago—died May 29, 1970, New York City), journalist and author who became famous for his series of sociopolitical books describing and interpreting for American readers various regions of the world, beginning with Inside Europe (1936). Cuthbertson, Ken (1992). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. Bonus Books. pp. 5–8. ISBN 978-0929387703. Cuthbertson, Ken (October 2002). Inside: The Biography of John Gunther. pp.247–256. ISBN 9780759232884. Gunther begins his discovery of America in California — “the most spectacular and most diversified American state, California so ripe, golden, yeasty, churning in flux. … at once demented and very sane, adolescent and mature” — and he proceeds around the country, state by state, until he arrives in Arizona, next door to where he began. Sometimes he devotes an entire chapter to a single person — the perpetual presidential candidate-to-be Harold Stassen; the great industrialist Henry Kaiser; New York’s colorful (to say the least) Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who is probably best remembered for having, during a strike of newspaper deliverers, read “the funnies” aloud on the radio so as not to disappoint the city’s kids.For “Inside U.S.A.,” Mr. Gun ther spent 13 months criss crossing the nation and 14 ac tually writing the book. Visit ing more than 300 towns and cities, he interviewed 2 to 20 people a day, and in all took more than a million words of notes. John J. Gunther, About the Author, Biography at Harper Collins Publishers, Accessed 22 October 2012. A novel, “The Indian Sign,” is scheduled for publication by Harper & Row June 17. Four other published fiction works were unsuccesful.