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.

Baldwin soon left Harlem for Greenwich Village, where he began to make literary and art connections, but had trouble finding a publisher for his 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. He published many notable works during this time, including the novel Go Tell it on the Mountain and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son.

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 and publishing several book-length essays, as well as two more novels. Returning to France in the 1970s, Baldwin 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. He left behind a prolific body of work that is recognized for its themes of race, sexuality, class, and masculinity.

James Baldwin died of stomach cancer on December 1, 1987, at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.

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.