J.C. Furnas

Joseph Chamberlain Furnas (1905–2001) was an American freelance writer best known for his influential 1935 Reader's Digest article \"---And Sudden Death!\", which raised national awareness of automobile safety issues and became the publication's most-reprinted piece, praised by Ralph Nader for advancing road safety reforms LA Times. He authored a acclaimed trilogy of informal social histories of the United States—The Americans (1969), Great Times (1974), and Stormy Weather (1978)—along with notable works like The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum, Goodbye to Uncle Tom, and Voyage to Windward, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson hailed as the finest of its time LA Times. Educated at Harvard and a WWII war correspondent, Furnas also wrote novels, South Pacific books, and exposed the true inspiration behind Lillian Hellman's \"Julia\" in his autobiography.