A restless, unorthodox roving reporter, Floyd Gibbons brought high excitement, courage, and ingenuity into his foreign and war correspondence to earn his reputation as the premier war correspondent of his generation. He also pioneered, along with Graham McNamee, the reporting of news events by radio in the 1920s and, among other firsts, broadcast on-the-scene reports using the portable "knapsack" transmitter.

Christened Raphael Floyd Phillips Gibbons in Washington, D.C., Gibbons was the eldest of five children of Edward Thomas and Emma Theresa Phillips Gibbons. A Roman Catholic, Gibbons was enrolled in Washington's Gonzaga College at the age of eleven but attended public schools in Des Moines, Iowa, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, when his father, a produce dealer and business promoter, took the family to those cities. He returned to Washington to continue his education in the preparatory department of Georgetown University, but the pranks which were characteristic of his...