James Baldwin was born James Arthur Jones on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York City, to single mother (Emma) Berdis Jones. When he was five, his mother married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher and laborer from Louisiana, at which time her son took her new husband’s last name. James Baldwin had at least three older stepsiblings and eight younger half-siblings. His relationship with his stepfather was contentious, as the two did not agree on many of the younger Baldwin’s pursuits.

Baldwin developed his passion for literature at an early age writing and editing for school publications, winning awards and accolades through high school. However, once he left school and started working to help support his family, he experienced a greater frequency of racism that had not been present in his everyday life. Baldwin soon left Harlem for Greenwich Village, where he began to make literary and art connections, including artist Beauford Delaney, who would remain a lifelong friend. Baldwin also began to publish essays, though he could not find a publisher for two completed novels.

Facing growing frustration with the racism and prejudice, Baldwin left New York City for Paris in November 1948. While he was impoverished for most of the next nine years, he also grew close to a large group of Black American expatriates, taking in the cultural offerings Paris offered, and traveling to other European cities. He published many notable works during this time, including short stories, critiques, individual essays as well as a collection of essays, and two novels.

Baldwin returned to New York in 1958, and became one of the faces of the growing Civil Rights Movement throughout the 1960s, touring the American South, speaking on college campuses, appearing on television, and publishing several book-length essays, as well as two more novels. While Baldwin rejected labels regarding sexuality, others saw him as a gay man, which led to controversy over his position in the movement. Over the course of the decade, he lost notable activist friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to assassination, which influenced his later work.

Returning to France in the 1970s, Baldwin was less active in literary and Civil Rights circles. He devoted himself to writing, and published two more novels, a number of essays and essay collections, and a book of poetry. In his lifetime, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three MacDowell Fellowships, and was honored with the Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1986. James Baldwin died of stomach cancer on December 1, 1987, at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, leaving behind a prolific body of work.

Russell Edson was born Russell Leon Edelstein in Manhattan, New York, on December 12, 1928, to Gus and Gladys Cedar Edelstein. His father was a cartoonist, known for the comic strips The Gumps and Dondi. Sometime between 1930 and 1935, the family name was changed to Edson, and the family eventually moved to Connecticut, where Russell Edson spent most of his life.

Edson attended the Art Students League in New York City as a teenager, then moved on to the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, and Black Mountain College. He was best known for his surrealist prose poetry, which he began to publish in the 1950s, though he also wrote novels, short stories, music, and a play, as well as illustrating some of his own work. Edson won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and the 1989 Whiting Award.

With his wife Francis, Edson lived a quiet life in Stamford and Darien, Connecticut. He published at least nineteen collections of poems, one play, and two novels. He died April 29, 2014, after a long illness.