Thomas Grey Wicker's respected talent as a journalist has taken him from his origins in Hamlet, North Carolina, to The New York Times. There he served as associate editor, former Washington bureau chief, as well as the author of the famous op-ed column "In the Nation" for thirty years. He is the author of a considerable number of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction books as well.

Wicker earned his journalism degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1948, at first wrote for papers in Aberdeen and Lumberton. He wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal for eight years and The Nashville Tennessean for two years before heading up to the Times, where he eventually retired in 1991. Wicker's famous report on the assassination of President Kennedy, written from the perspective of the motorcade following the president, has been praised as the most accurate first-hand account of the shooting. His assignment to act as an observer during the Attica Prison stand-off in New York State was described in his book A Time to Die (1975).

Wicker has also written several other works of nonfiction, ten novels, and articles in over twenty-five leading magazines. Works include Kennedy Without Tears, JFK and LBJ, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, and George Herbert Walker Bush. He has also written under the penname Paul Connally. His favorite work is Unto This Hour, about the second battle of Bull Run. His numerous awards include the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, the Sacred Cat Award from the Milwaukee Press Club, and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

Although Wicker has been a popular public speaker on campuses, he considers himself to be a newspaperman first. He has been a visiting scholar at the First Amendment Center in Nashville, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Wicker currently lives in Rochester, Vermont with his wife Pamela Hill, a television producer and VP of the Cable Network News.