Writer and journalist Gerald Johnson was born in Riverton in Scotland County, and educated at Wake Forest College and the University of Toulouse, France. He started his newspaper career at age twenty by founding, with others, the Thomasville Davidsonian. Subsequently, he worked at the Lexington Dispatch and the Greensboro Daily News until 1924, when he joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina as a professor of Journalism. During his tenure there, he worked with President Harry Woodburn Chase to defeat antievolution bills in the General Assembly.

In 1926, Johnson moved to Baltimore, and spent the next seventeen years working for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Baltimore Sun as a columnist and editorial writer. Despite diametrically opposed personal and political philosophies, he was a longtime friend of H.L. Mencken, the "sage of Baltimore," and was often called "Baltimore's second sage." His liberal and humanist philosophies ultimately caused him to part company with the Sunpapers in 1943, although he did so under the friendliest of terms. For the rest of his life he devoted his energies to freelance writing, briefly holding positions at the New York Herald Tribune and the London Sunday Express.

Between 1925 and 1976, Johnson published dozens of books, including biographies, essays, commentaries on the American scene, two novels, two mysteries, and two trilogies about American history and government written for his young grandson, Peter. He also served as a speech writer for Adlai E. Stevenson's presidential campaign. Gerald Johnson always regarded himself as a journalist rather than an historian, stating that "the historian writes authoritatively, for posterity; the journalist writes speculatively, for today....The historian is the priest; the journalist is his acolyte; but they are, or should be, both servants of the truth."

A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Johnson was awarded numerous honorary degrees from universities in Baltimore and his native North Carolina. He also received the DuPont Commentator's Award, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1965, the Andrew White Medal from Baltimore's Loyola College, and the Maryland Civil Liberties Award. Upon his death in 1980, major obituaries appeared in newspapers across North Carolina as well as in The New York Times and the Baltimore Sun, which described him as "a man who never seemed flustered or hurried... .White-haired and with a white mustache, the writer, who was not a large man, looked frail in his later years, but his ideas remained as robust as ever."

Excerpt from By Reason of Strength
Minton, Balch & Company, 1930

To the small boy, Cousin Matty's words were even as Holy Writ. Her factual life was gray and dim; but the life she touched through her contact with the youngsters was all purple and gold, for in the most commonplace experience, if it happened to another, she could descry Romance. Imaginatively, the gray little spinster was a swashbuckling adventurer. She could thrill the children. They loved her. It was a rainy afternoon when she talked of Grandmaa Whyte. Summer was definitely declining. Only three or four days remained before the opening of school, which was bad enough; but these three or four seemed likely to be ruined by September gales, which was worse. Water was standing in a pool on the tennis court. Fishing and swimming were out of the question in such a downpour, and the dogged determination with which the rain descended made it practically certain that there would be no hayride that night. Gusts slapped the rain in your face if you walked out, and the weeds and pea-vines were so thoroughly soaked that to seek for a later watermelon in the field, or for Delaware peaches or russet apples in the orchard, meant a drenching to the waist. It was a sloppy day, not quite cold enough for a fire, yet lacking summer's generous warmth. On such a day, Cousin Matty was the one specific against the boredom which is worse than pain. She sat in a sheltered nook on the back porch, doing something with her hands- knitting, mending, shelling peas—how should a boy of fifteen know? What did it matter, anyway? Nothing Cousin Matty did ever mattered; only what she said counted. "Did you even really see Grandmaa Whyte, Cousin Matty?" I asked. "Oh yes," said she. "When I was a young girl, she was a very old woman, but as spry as a cricket." Your grandma was two years older than I, and her mother used to call for Grandmaa Whyte whenever any of us got sick. You see, Grandmaa was really your grandma's grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and there had been so much intermarrying that she was kin to pretty nigh everybody in Spring Hill township. And everybody, kin or not, sent for her when there was any trouble. She was a sort of doctor, and judge and preacher for the whole country. There never was such a woman! Hasn't any one ever told you about her?" "No," said I. It was false, of course, but Cousin Matty needed only one little push to be fairly launched; and on such an afternoon who would not have given it her? And she, as a matter of fact, had never told me about Grandmaa Whyte—she who could certainly tell it better than any one else. So I pushed her, and she was launched.

America Grows Up. New York: Morrow, 1960.

America is Born. New York: Morrow, 1959.

America Moves Forward. New York: Morrow, 1960.

America-Watching: Perspectives in the Course of an Incredible Century. Owing Mills, Md.: Stemmer House, 1976.

American Heroes and Hero-Worship. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943.

America's Silver Age: The Statecraft of Clay-Webster-Calhoun. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939.

Andrew Jackson: An Epic in Homespun. New York: Balch & Co., 1927.

The British Empire. New York: William Morrow, 1969.

By Reason of Strength. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1930.

By Reason of Strength. Laurinburg: St. Andrews College Press, 1994.

The Cabinet. New York: William Morrow, 1966.

Communism: An American's View. New York: Morrow, 1964.

The Congress. New York: Morrow, 1963.

The First Captain, the Story of John Paul Jones. New York: Coward-McCann, 1947.

Franklin D. Roosevelt. Portrait of a Great Man. New York: William Morrow, 1967.

Hod-Carrier: Notes of a Laborer on an Unfinished Cathedral. New York: Morrow, 1964.

An Honorable Titan: A Biographical Study of Adolph S. Ochs. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

The Imperial Republic. New York: Liveright, 1972.

Incredible Tale: The Odyssey of the Average American in the Last Half Century. New York: Harper, 1950.

Liberal's Progress. New York: Coward-McCann, 1948.

The Lines Are Drawn. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958.

A Little Night-Music. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937.

The Lunatic Fringe. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957.

The Making of a Southern Industrialist: A Biographical Study of Simpson Bobo Tanner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952.

The Man Who Feels Left Behind. New York: Morrow, 1961.

Mount Vernon: The Story of a Shrine. New York: Random House, 1953.

Number Thirty-Six. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1933.

Our English Heritage. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1949.

Patterns for Liberty: The Story of Philadelphia. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952.

Peril and Promise. New York: Harper, 1958.

The Presidency. New York: Morrow, 1962.

Randolph of Roanoke. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1929.

Roosevelt: Dictator or Democrat? New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941.

The Secession of the Southern States. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933.

South-Watching: Selected Essays. Edited by Fred Hobson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

The Supreme Court. New York: Morrow, 1962.

This American People. New York: Harper, 1951.

The Undefeated. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1927.

The Wasted Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.

Woodrow Wilson: The Unforgettable Figure Who Has Returned to Haunt Us. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944.

Appearances in a number of periodicals, including American Mercury, American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Century, Harper's, Journal of Social Forces, Life, Look, New Republic, North American Review, Reviewer, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review of Literature, Scribner's, Southwest Review, Survey, Survey Graphic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and World's Work.