Gerald W. Johnson : From Southern Liberal to National Conscience

Born in Riverton, North Carolina, Gerald White Johnson (1890-1980) served as one of the most eloquent spokespersons for America's adversary culture in the twentieth century. His prolific career spanned nearly seventy-five years and produced approximately fifteen million words. Among his more than forty books were biographies, histories, novels and two highly successful children's series on American history and government. A friend of H. L. Mencken, Johnson always considered himself primarily a journalist. His prose brought acclaim to such newspapers as the Greensboro Daily News and the Baltimore Evening Sun. He was a regional writer who enjoyed dissecting the South for his fellow southerners and explaining it to Yankees, and a national writer who did not hesitate to voice his opinion on everything from the 1929 stock market crash to Vietnam.

In the first biography of Johnson, Vincent Fitzpatrick draws upon a wealth of archival material to chronicle the writer's service in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, his experience as the first professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, and his years in Baltimore with the Evening Sun. Fitzpatrick analyzes Johnson's commentary on the Scopes trial, denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan, defense of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and battles with the Republican Party during President Eisenhower's two terms. He was, to borrow his own phrase, a "disturber of the peace." Fitzpatrick brings this controversial essayist, journalist, editor, historian, biographer, and novelist vividly to life in all his diverse roles. The long and lively career of Gerald Johnson, whom Adlai Stevenson extolled as "the critic and conscience of our time," proves a significant part of the American record in the twentieth century.

Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the H. L. Mencken Collection at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, is the author of H. L. Mencken.