one of the most influential newspaper columnists in the United States.

Pearson was the son of a Quaker professor who became governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1919. After traveling in postwar Europe, he taught industrial geography for three years at the University of Pennsylvania, quit teaching, and settled on a career in journalism. He combined reporting and lecturing on his travels with interviews and covered numerous major international events, including anti-foreigner strikes in China in 1925 and the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927. He was on the staff of the United States Daily from 1926 to 1933 and wrote for the Baltimore Sun from 1929 to 1932. Pearson and Robert S. Allen, another Washington, D.C., reporter, wrote a book, Washington Merry-Go-Round (1931), a gossipy treatment of the scene in the U.S. capital. He and Allen were fired for writing the irreverent book, but its success brought them an invitation to write a column with the same name for syndication. The column first appeared in 1932, setting a style for many similar columns by other writers. Pearson and Allen went their separate ways in 1942, Allen to do a column of his own, while Pearson continued “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

As his reputation grew Pearson visited and interviewed many world leaders, among them Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. In 1947 he hired as a reporter Jack Anderson, who became his partner in 1965 and inherited the column on Pearson's death. Among Pearson's books was Will Khrushchev Bury Us? (1962). He began to keep an informal diary in 1949 and continued it until his death. Portions were published in 1974 as Drew Pearson's Diaries: 1949–1959.