Lowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, broadcaster, and documentary filmmaker, known as a world traveler. He authored more than fifty non-fiction books, mostly travel narratives and popular biographies of explorers and military men. Between 1930 and the mid-1970s, Thomas appeared regularly on radio and occasionally on television as a travel and news commentator. Until the 1950s, he was a narrator of Movietone newsreels shown in cinemas.