 Johnson has been called "a towering intellect of colonial America, a man of great curiosity and philosophical interests", “the most erudite colonial Anglican theologian of the eighteenth century”, “The Founder of American Philosophy”, the“first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there”, “the first to give to education that thought and attention which his countrymen have continued to devote to it”, the "Father of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut", and “The First Psychological Author in America”.His works and his list of books read between 1719 and 1755 have also been used to trace the evolution of the American Colonial mind by Norman Fiering and Joseph Ellis.He is the subject of two nineteenth century biographies (Chandler, Beardsley) each of which went to two editions, three twentieth-century books (Schneider, Ellis, Carrol) along with a number of book length dissertations, and is the focus (so far) of two twenty-first-century books (Erlach and DeMille, Olsen).