When the second issue of the VQR appeared in the summer of 1925, one of its contributors was a North Carolina newspaperman named Gerald W. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was to remain a VQR contributor for the next half century, with his last article appearing in the Quarterly's 50th anniversary issue in 1975, five years before his death in March 1980 at age 89. In the course of his long life, Mr. Johnson was one of America's most prolific writers, producing some three dozen books of history, biography, and commentary as well as thousands of essays and editorials (H. L. Mencken recruited him as an editorial writer for the Baltimore Sunpapers in 1926, a position he held until 1943). In his time, then, Johnson was one of the country's foremost commentators ("the conscience of America," in the view of Adlai Stevenson). Yet today, less than two years after his death, Gerald Johnson has become a forgotten man of American letters. This is a grievance that Fred Hobson seeks to redress in his thoughtful article about this Southern liberal and realist. An associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, Mr. Hobson has also prepared a collection of Johnson's essays which North Carolina will publish later this year. Mr. Hobson recently completed his own group of essays, a book on interpreters of the South tentatively entitled Tell About the South: Fourteen Southerners and a Rage to Explain the region from 1850 to 1970.