Gerald White Johnson was a writer, reporter, editor, and journalist. He was born in Riverton, N.C., in Scotland County, on August 6, 1890, the only son of Archibald and Flora McNeill Johnson. He graduated from Wake Forest College (1911) and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa honor society. He later studied at the University of Toulouse, France. He began his long writing career by founding The Davidson in 1910 in Thomasville, N.C. He also worked at the  Lexington Dispatch (1911-1913) and  Greensboro Daily News (1913-1924). Johnson served in during the first World War with the U.S. Army's 321st infantry, 81st Division (1917-1918), followed by a year with the American Expeditionary Force in France. After the war, he became the University of North Carolina's first Journalism professor; this is where he wrote his first book,  The Story of Man's Work. He was hired by the  Baltimore Evening Sun (1926-1939) and then the  Baltimore Sun (1939-1943). Johnson moved from news media to primarily authoring books, publishing more than 30 fiction and non-fiction books. He also wrote magazine articles and provided broadcast commentary in Baltimore.

Johnson was granted the Alfred I. duPont Award for excellence in broadcast journalism (1952), the Peabody Award for the most powerful and enlightening stories in media (1953), and the Hillman Prize for a journalist who pursues social justice and public policy for the common good (1953). He also was awarded the N.C. Award (1965), the highest civilian honor given by the state, and was inducted into the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame posthumously (1996). Johnson received honorary degrees from Wake Forest, University of N.C. at Greensboro, Goucher College, and Johns Hopkins University.

In 1922, Johnson married Kathryn Dulsinea Hayward and they had two daughters, Kathryn Johnson Sliger and Dorothy van den Honert. He died March 22, 1980, in Baltimore, Maryland.